The text-to-speech tool in the Irish Gaelic lessons has very poor, anglicised pronunciation which will give learners the wrong impression of how the language sounds. This is especially harming since the language is endangered and a pidgin variant has been propagated by teachers who themselves were taught wrong pronunciation.
For comparison, the mini-stories have audio recorded by a speaker from Gaeltacht Mhaigh Eo; this is how the language actually sounds.
The website ABAIR has a much better TTS that is trained using native speakers of the 3 main dialects. If this could be integrated into LingQ, this would be an improvement of almost infinite value, especially if the user could choose to hear how a word sounds in each dialect.
ABAIR is backed by a top univiersity, Trinity.
Note there are three regional pronunciations that ABAIR offers. Bonus points if you let user choose which one to listen to.
I just want to come back to this point about updating the Microsoft A.I Irish with A.I from Abair.ie (ABAIR) as soon as possible please - As it says on their website it is a ‘STATE OF THE ART’ speech and language technology for the Irish Gaelic language with far better synthesis and recognition for Irish than what’s currently used on many platforms and apps, including Lingq.
It is important to teach consistent and correct pronunciation, in particular for minority languages like Irish, which unfortunately Microsoft DOES NOT do at all, and if left unchecked can be disastrous for the language and future learners.