Cantonese Audio for more than one entry - phrases, menu items, etc.

Susan

Member
Hello, when I enter a search term such as 自包足料餃予 I get six separate entries, which is fine - this is from a menu in Hong Kong, so I don't expect Pleco to recognize the title/name of the dish. But I would like to hear the audio for the full string in Cantonese, and I seem to have only a Mandarin option. If I drill down to a single entry I have the option to hear either Mandarin or Canto for 自 or 包, etc., but there is no such option to hear the full audio for 自包足料餃予. If I enter this in my user dictionary it then appears as a single entry, so I can play the audio all in one piece. I have set every option that I can find to Canto over Mandarin, and I just installed version 3.2.60 earlier today, along with the various new add-ons for audio (neokayan, neokayo, neoliang, neohui etc.). I was having this issue with the older version, and hoped the new one would take care of it, but no such luck. I haven't used the new version for long enough to notice any changes, other than it's now taking a lot longer to load on my 5 year old Samsung Note 3. Thanks in advance.
 

Shun

状元
Hello Susan,

I have version 3.2.60, too, and I think the reason is that you have the following setting turned on:

Screenshot_20180729-073326.jpg

With the setting turned off, I can tap the right speaker button for unknown search terms like 自包足料餃子:

Screenshot_20180729-071514.jpg

If you don't have that setting enabled, it's the Language / Enable Cantonese setting that turns the second speaker icon on and off for me.


Hope this helps,

Shun
 
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Susan

Member
Hi Shun,
Thanks for the suggestions. I've toggled both settings on and off to see exactly what they control, and it does not solve the problem. Here's my screen, with only one speaker icon on the toolbar for a five character phrase with three dictionary entries:

1532845602786.png

I have Don't Show Unknown Toolbar unchecked; when I check it I lose the entire toolbar with the speaker & pen icons, plus sign etc..
I have Language / Enable Cantonese checked; when I uncheck it, it turns off the second speaker on the individual dictionary entries (on the screen that shows up when I select one of the individual dictionary entries.)

I have Android version 4.4.2 on Model SM-N9005 Samsung Note 3.
 

Shun

状元
You're welcome! I tried switching some other settings around with no luck.

You could always reset all settings with the button at the top of Settings, then enable Cantonese and see if the second speaker icon will appear, but if you already have made a lot of settings, it would be a bit of work to set them back. Otherwise, I'm certain that @mikelove will be able to help.
 

Susan

Member
Good idea, but before I reset I think I'll wait and see if Mike (or anyone else) has any suggestions :) Support for Pleco has always been excellent.
Regards, Susan
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Have you actually purchased the Kaho and/or Kayan TTS add-ons?

If you have purchased one of them, could you PM or email me your Registration ID from the Pleco "Registration" screen so we can make sure there's nothing wrong with your account?

If you haven't purchased them, Google TTS no longer supports Cantonese on Android 4.4 (we think because Android 4.4 didn't know how to interpret locale codes for Cantonese correctly and Google gave up on trying to work around that issue in a recent update to Google TTS), so that would explain why the button isn't appearing. So the only fixes would be to update to a newer version of Android or purchase Kayan or Kaho. (obviously if you do purchase one of those and it doesn't fix this we'll be happy to give you a refund)
 

Susan

Member
Hi Mike,
I've been playing around with some ideas for a major reworking of my flashcards, so I wanted to be sure I had the newest version of Pleco. I tried to upgrade/add on with Google play, but wasn't able to, so I downloaded the zip files from your site and copied them over to my phone. I browsed thru the forums a bit, and just selected anything from your website that looked like it had to do with Canto, which included Neokayan and Neokaho. I haven't paid anything--I was never asked so I thought it was a free upgrade :confused: I think it installed ok, I don't remember any error messages - maybe I should check? Do you want my old registration ID so you can check things out on your end? If I owe you money, let me know how much and I'll pay you.

I haven't noticed any difference in the function of Canto. The text to speech works in the individual dictionary entries work fine, and a phrase with multiple dictionary entries works fine too, AFTER I have turned it into a single entry in the user dictionary. But as you can see in the screen shot above, there is no Canto button when I have a phrase with multiple dictionary entries.

I haven't noticed a lot of changes yet--I just found the colored labels for the flashcard keywords which is very cool. Thank you for that, but I don't know if it's new or I just discovered it.

edit: I should have just checked my phone. I had Kaho Text to Speech Voice as a Demo, and I didn't have Kayan. I'm guessing I just missed it, as I had to install each add-on separately. The zip file was there, so I now I have both Kaho and Kayan installed as Demos. I still have only one audio button, as above.
 
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mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Sorry, we don't actually offer demos of Kaho and Kayan for licensing reasons - if you download them through the "Add-ons" screen we make that fact obvious (there's no 'download demo' button), but the separate file download page doesn't currently have a way to determine if you already own something. You can listen to samples of them in "Add-ons" but you can't actually use them on your own arbitrary text without paying for them. (the files will sit there in Pleco's file directory but they're inactive / locked until those add-ons are purchased)

For Cantonese in individual entries I imagine you're using our Cantonese audio recordings rather than TTS; we don't currently support using those to read arbitrary texts, only to read dictionary headwords - to be honest if you tried to use them for a sentence they'd sound pretty terrible.
 

Susan

Member
Yes, they are they same two voices I've been hearing for years, and they do sound pretty bad! But they give me the string, which is better than clicking on each entry. So if I can make this work, it can be better. Ok, so I need to try Kaho and Kayan, and if they don't work then decide if I want to subject my five year old phone to another Samsung update. How do I pay you for the updates?
 

Susan

Member
Hi, I bought both of these as well as a couple of dictionary's, the outlier looks AWESOME for a language nerd like me -- but I didn't realize how much storage space they would all take :(

With a five+ year old phone, I'm totally maxed out., but I'd like to at least try the Kayo/Kayan updates to see if they improve my audio. I guess I can wait on the dictionaries for now. Two questions:

1. If I move Pleco to the SD card, what is it going to cost me in terms of ease of use/speed? If you can make an estimate I'd appreciate it. (I've moved everything else that's movable!)

2. I would LOVE to be able to add cards/edit etc in Pleco on my computer (Anki has a major advantage there) and I hope you move in that direction. But in the meantime, I'm considering a new tablet/phablet any suggestions on what larger screen devices are best/compatible with Pleco?

Hmm, maybe an external keyboard for my phone would make my life a bit easier. In any case, thanks for a great product, as always!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
SD card speed penalty is really hard to predict, to be honest - huge on some devices and small on others, I'd generally expect an Android 4.4 device to have less-than-stellar SD card performance but the internal flash may not be all that speedy either.

Large screen devices: iPads are still far and away the best tablets on the market if you don't mind Apple or their high price tags. (Pleco purchases / data files are fully transferrable between platforms - there may be a period after 4.0 comes out on iOS but before it comes out on Android when they're not, but we've actually added an exporter for our old data format in 4.0, and 4.0 will track all of the statistics it needs to dump data back to that format with perfect fidelity, so as long as you keep our iPad app in old-Pleco-emulation-mode you should still be able to move data back and forth between platforms) Failing that, among Android tablets, get one with as new an Android version as you can, and don't get one from Amazon since they don't support the Play Store.

Desktop editing: our Android app actually works fine on most Chromebooks, and we expect to also support macOS next year via Apple's Project Marizpan, but not much we can do for Windows without a very expensive/complicated port (or a web app). There's a long thread here discussing various options for emulating Android on Windows to run Pleco, but as the comments suggest it's not exactly the most stable / reliable process.
 
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