TTS feedback

[Katja from Hamburg]

Hi Ernie,
I did some tests with TTS. Please here my comments:
1) I'm not sure what the "show TTS beta" is for. It is ok if it really only for activation of TTS beta in any other case:
- it could not set to off anymore
- I would expect any general settings for sound in option/sound and not in option/view
2) re edit/TTS beta
- on this page a help link is necessary to decribe the steps
(choose voice, download till done, adjust layout for sound, ...)
- there should be a hint that any own sound 1 will be overwritten
- what is the setting "reload" for?
- perhaps "voice" is confusing as there is already TTS "speach" and also "sound"
- the list of "voices" already includes german although it is not working (resp. it is engl)
- if ( in next version) voice it set to "none" is there again a download required
to remove the sound and free the space?
3) editing and adding a card
- will there be a possibility to refresh TTS download for a single card
4) uploading decks
- will there be a question to download/refresh TTS download as a step of downloading decks
e.g. after export to excel and some changes I do a download but TTS should be refreshed
5) sound/text
- homepage ... TTS.apx is mentioning "a voice to any side ..."
but the voice is referring to "text 1..5" which is different to "side 1..5"
- the layout allows only one sound per side. is there any plan to increase that?

regards, Katja

[Ernie]

Hi Katja, Sorry for the slow response on this.

1) I called it Beta because I was concerned that my server wouldn't be able to keep up with demand. I burried the setting to turn it on because I didn't know when I would get my TTS server up and running and didn't want to advertise it if it wasn't working. (I submitted the app to Apple before my TTS server was ready.)

2) I will document TTS in the next update and will provide better instructions on what is going on. Thanks for your input on confusing terminology. By default, only sides without an existing sound will download a new sound. You can turn an option on to redownload (re-process) all sounds. This is useful if you've made changes, but it's admittedly very inefficient. If you've changed some text, you can delete the sound from the card edit screen and re-run TTS without downloading all sounds; but this is not convenient to manually delete sounds. In the next version, setting to "None" will not remove sounds. I don't have plans to remove sounds right now, but maybe it's something I should offer.

3) To refresh a single card, you need to manually delete the existing sounds and re-run TTS. I'll need to think about more elegant solutions.

4) I don't plan on asking user about TTS right when they download. They need to go to TTS screen. Again, I probably need to figure out how to update for changes more efficiently.

5) "side 1" vs "text 1": ok. I don't have any plans to allow 2 sound clips on a side.


I was hoping to get German from Google translate, but they don't support a mass download of TTS sounds. I will proabbly use Microsoft sounds for the next update, which don't seem very good quality, but I don't have a better option at the moment.