Reading some Russian text on ipad Lingq app on m3 air. OS 26.0. Pronunciation is so bad. Absolutely abysmal. Sounds like a ridiculous parody of a new learner that hasn’t a clue about pronunciation.
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What voice you have selected under the settings?
The “Tatyana (female)” voice on the desktop often mispronounces the “yo” (e with two dots over it.)
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Same text, same place in the text, and today the voice and pronunciation is fine. Yesterday, as noted, it was horrible.
@vernmartin Thanks, let me know if you notice the same issue again. Also, in case you notice bad pronunciation for some word, give it a second or two for the voice to load properly, in cases the internet connection isn’t great it can take a bit more time to load, and then try to play the voice for the same word again.
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“Tatyana’s” pronunciation is frequently wrong, at least compared to YouTube videos and audiobooks. This isn’t a matter of the audio loading over the internet, it is a matter of an audio program that generates words with the wrong stress. Because Russian vowel sounds can change, depending on stress, you really need to get the stress right to be understood.
I am concerned that I may be drilling wrong pronunciation from the “Tatyana” computer voice.
I see in another thread that “Maxim” may be a little better, so I’m going to switch.
Frankly, I think it might be best to remove Tatyana altogether, especially if another female voice option is available.
The truth is, I most often listen to the original audio from the native speaker. Unfortunately, even though I upload an SRT file that is perfectly synchronized with the audio, the Lingq app still does not perfectly play it in sentence mode. That’s truly a shame, because sentence mode could be such great practice! Such a simple ask. Please tell me why that’s so hard to get right.
@vernmartin I can’t tell, but I can do is to provide your feedback to our development team. I know they are looking into it and doing their best to make improvements.
I’ve already mentioned on this forum that the German voice named Josef is quite problematic. It often mispronounces words and sometimes adds unnecessary emotional emphasis, which makes it sound rather unnatural. I even created a separate topic about how broken this voice is, and from what I understand, the development team is aware of the issue and is hopefully working on improving it.
I’m not sure how things are with the Russian voices on the platform, but when it comes to German, it seems that the team is genuinely trying to make progress. In the meantime, I’ve switched to using the Vicky voice, and I honestly think Vicky is currently the best German voice available here.
That said, I’m really hoping that the platform will eventually introduce an AI voice that matches the quality of the ones used in Microsoft’s browser — those voices are truly top-notch.
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