I am a beginner in Greek, but the natives in the audio all seem to palatize κη (soft vowel after kappa making a “chee” sound) but the computer voice does not. It is somewhat disconcerting as this pallatization occurs rather often.
HOWEVER, maybe this is just a dialect and there is no error in the computer voice.
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I don’t know much about Greek and not sure how it should sound, to be honest. I assume audio version is correct, I trust it more than auto TTS, or maybe it’s just a dialect, yeah. I’ll try to find out.
You’re correct. As a reference, this website is a wonderful detailed reference about Greek pronunciation by a very articulate native speaker, including a lot of info on palatalization, examples, audio samples, discussion of exceptions and more:
https://foundalis.com/lan/grphdetl.htm
Notice that the author considers the k+i = ci [rather than chi] palatalization to be standard. For what I know about Greek dialects, they tend to exaggerate palatalization rather than reduce it. This is a reference:
http://www.enl.auth.gr/staff/topintzi/papers/Tromso-PAL_2014.pdf
So TTS pronunciation seems to be simply unnatural. It probably sounds a bit like what the author of the above website describes:
Anyway, that’s just my two cents, try comparing the pronunciations of the audio source and TTS to the audio samples in the website above to be sure. As I already wrote, I think the latter is a high quality reference for native-like pronunciation of standard Greek.
Thank you so much, I am checking it out now…
Hi shakespeareanbard, as far as I know, this speaker comes from Crete, hence the difference in his pronunciation.
I had two problems with his tracks: 1) the “ch” instead of “k” (not difficult to deal with because I had started learning Greek from another source), 2) his attitude. He sounds so sad! Didn’t enjoy listening to him. But he was the first to produce these lessons so it would be unfair to replace them.
Btw, did you use the German section here? Lots of the lessons there are spoken by an Austrian who speaks Austrian standard German, which deviates exceedingly from the standard German used in Germany which is the German you would find in all the traditional courses. The difference there is much wider than the one between standard Greek and “LingQ beginner lesson Greek”. As a native speaker of German I can just guess how confusing that must be for learners.
There are two versions of “Who Is She?”. One is called “Ποια Είναι?”, the other “Ποια Είναι Αυτή?” The former is one voice, Crete accent, the latter is spoken in standard Greek, with one speaker for each person. I strictly used the latter, of course 
PS: Reread your post. I observed the “ch” phenomenon in the one speaker I mentioned. Never noticed there were more than one who did this!
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Thanks for the detailed explanation, very helpful. I used to be interested in German and that is good to know also if I want to go back into that language.
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Hi shakespeareanbard! I’m Greek, and I can confirm that what you’ve been hearing is indeed Cretan dialect (κη = chee). So I’d say you’d be better off trusting the computer voice on that one. The way Greeks pronounce κη, κι, κυ, κοι, and so on, is much less palatised than the Cretan version, but by no means as non-palatised as the “kee” of a native English speaker when pronouncing the word “key”.
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