Bug (?) - TTS doesn't distinguish between Mandarin vs Cantonese contexts

Tapping the audio icon alternates between Mandarin and Cantonese in many locations.

I have Pleco setup to show both Zhuyin and Jyutping.

I have the following audio add-ons installed:
  1. Hui (female, Mandarin)
  2. Kaho and Kaho enhanced (male, Cantonese)
  3. Male pre-recorded Mandarin audio, including extended version
  4. Female pre-recorded Mandarin audio, including extended version
  5. Some unknown Mandarin TTS that seems to be bundled with my phone's OS and not related to Pleco
Tapping audio icons in different locations works as follows:
  • Next to Zhuyin - 3 and 4 if available, falling back to 1 for female and syllable-segmented version of 3 for male. As expected.
  • Next to Jyutping - alternates between 2 and 5. I'd expect that it would always use 2, as no Cantonese female voice is available.
  • Inline in dictionary samples for non-Cantonese dictionaries - alternates between 1 and 2. I'd prefer if it always used a Mandarin pronunciation, falling back to syllable-segmented if necessary, but maybe this should be configurable...?
  • Inline in dictionary samples for Cantonese dictionaries - same problem as for next to Jyutping.
  • In pop-up - same as for next to Zhuyin. That's as expected for non-Cantonese dictionaries, but Cantonese dictionaries should be using 2.
  • Loudspeaker icon in clip reader - alternates between 1 and 2, which is fine and probably what most people would expect/want.
It's possible there's a setting I don't know about that could fix some of these, but otherwise it seems like a bug. Any ideas?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Set "System TTS Engine" to "None" in Settings / Audio and that should get rid of voice #5 - Android lacks a reliable way to specify "Cantonese" to text-to-speech engines and some take it upon themselves to interpret Cantonese-related language codes like zh_HK as Mandarin.

With inline audio in dictionary example sentences, we do normally alternate between Mandarin and Cantonese for examples in Mandarin dictionaries, yes - could certainly argue for making that customizable but it seems like a better default than Mandarin-only.
 
Thanks for the tip, that worked great!

could certainly argue for making that customizable but it seems like a better default than Mandarin-only.

Yeah, I guess it's debatable whether that one is a bug. Having the Cantonese option makes sense for examples like "从此以后" but seems pretty superfluous for examples like "打这儿起我就要天天学英语了". I can't imagine most Cantonese speakers have ever said "ze5 ji4" (这儿) in their lives ;)

One thing that would definitely improve the experience is if the audio for the inline samples was reliably cancelable. That way you could just double-tap the audio icon to skip the unwanted Cantonese (or the unwanted Mandarin). As it is, you have to wait for the whole audio recording to finish.
 
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