Assimil Gujarati

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Ichiro
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Assimil Gujarati

Postby Ichiro » Fri May 19, 2023 12:21 am

A Gujarati-speaking colleague and I have taken the recent Assimil Hindi course and converted it into Gujarati. We created Gujarati audio using computer-synthesised voices. So now there's a complete set of amateur Assimil Gujarati lessons and the dialog texts. If you are interested, you can find it on archive.org.

We haven't converted all the grammatical notes so you would still need to own a Gujarati grammar to use the course or, better, if you have some French ability, buy Assimil Hindi, read the grammatical notes there and check back for language specifics to a Gujarati grammar. The languages are similar enough that I think that Assimil Hindi would be a useful support for the new course a lot of the time.

Obviously, our amateur Assimil Gujarati is far from perfect, it would be better to have a real Assimil Gujarati course with actual voice actors, instead of our artificial computer-generated ones. Still, I don't believe Assimil have any plans for making their own Gujarati course, and Gujarati is not very well-endowed with learning materials - Teach Yourself, Colloquial - so we thought this would be better than nothing.
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Axon
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Re: Assimil Gujarati

Postby Axon » Sat May 20, 2023 5:52 am

Wonderful! I have no current plans to learn Gujarati but I admire and appreciate the effort all the same.

How would you and your colleague compare the Gujarati artificial voice to the quality of other TTS voices in other languages you speak, in terms of accuracy and quality?
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Ichiro
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Re: Assimil Gujarati

Postby Ichiro » Sat May 20, 2023 12:08 pm

Axon wrote:How would you and your colleague compare the Gujarati artificial voice to the quality of other TTS voices in other languages you speak, in terms of accuracy and quality?

It's an interesting question. I'm using the Narakeet platform. It haven't done a comprehensive survey, but it looks to me like a number of these platforms are using the same voice set, presumably licensed from some other company.

There's nothing like the same range or quality of Gujarati voices as are available in more mainstream target languages. Languages like French or Italian, for example, have over twenty voices, and to my ears they sound really pretty good. Listening to the British English voices, they can't be mistaken for anything but a computer simulations, but I think they're pretty good ones - not grating or with obvious failures. Of course, they are not monotonal exactly, but there's a constant measured tone, as they can't understand the sense of what they're saying. They can recognise and change intonation for questions through the presence at the end of the sentence of a question mark.

Gujarati has four voices, two male and two female, which is fortunately just enough for me to replicate the dialogues from Assimil Hindi. Two are notably better than the other two, and where possible I prioritised them in the dialogues. However even the better two seem to me a bit rougher than the best of the voices in better-served languages. I can't detect that they are able to change their intonation for questions. I'm afraid to say the other two have a robotic edge, and in fact they're marked in the portal for decommissioning in mid-June. I don't know if they're going to be replaced with something.

Still, honestly, for audio to listen to and shadow to bring the Gujarati learning dialogues alive, I think they're good enough. My Gujarati colleague has reassured me of the same.
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willcouchman
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Re: Assimil Gujarati

Postby willcouchman » Sat May 20, 2023 3:08 pm

This is FANTASTIC!

I had no real interest in Gujarati at this stage, but I've downloaded the PDF and am loving listening to it. Some of the voices sound quite natural, and even pleasant to listen to.

I just need to do this to replace the Assimil Hindi audio :lol:

Fantastic work!
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