The Levantine Arabic Short Stories Need to be Redone

As the title states, I think the Levantine Arabic short stories need to be redone. There are only a few that have pleasant voices to listen to. Unfortunately, I find the woman that does most of them rather aggravating to listen to because it seems like she took a speaking approach that was meant for young children and not adults. In contrast, the Egyptian Arabic short stories are quite pleasant to listen to and I don’t have any problems with those.

Well it depends, I think. We all have different tastes and I am sure for each course some users will find voice more pleasant while some won’t like it. Female voice in Levantine Arabic is in my opinion good. I am not saying it can’t be better, but it’s loud clear, with appropriate speed.

I did think something similar earlier on the Levantine stories. The part that I’m thinking about was specifically where narrates the school girl stories, from first person perspective, and really imitates the voice of a young schoolgirl. I’ve had no dramas with them though, in fact they’ve been extremely beneficial for me, and I’m very grateful.

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Dunno - I think listening to content in challenging intonations(!) is no bad thing, and the sing-song quality helps me remember them.

lol, yes it was annoying at first, but I got past it. I have a bigger problem with the text to speech. I’m specifically studying Levantine Arabic, but the text to speech gives MSA pronunciations.
update I’m on the 14th story, and now I’m annoyed.

I have the same problem. I’m studying Egyptian Arabic, and the text to speech pronunciation attempts with the MSA voice are ridiculous and impossible to understand.

Came to the forum to ask if people were having the same problem with the text-to-speech. Thought I was going crazy!

It’s annoying but I get that it’s a really complex issue. To train an AI to synthesize speech is difficult, especially in Arabic, and especially a dialect. They would require a lot of training material (aka very clear audio, with high quality and consistent transcripts, and a lot of it). It seems to me there is no good text-to-speech for Levantine Arabic.

Best I could find was the Microsoft Translator App which seems to be able to understand Levantine speech, but not perform text-to-speech. Notably, they do have text-to-speech for Egyptian and Saudi accent, so I guess that’s something :wink:

As a suggestion to others: you can disable automatic text-to-speech in the reader settings