Does anybody know if there’s already a Userscript to integrate with the Forvo API (http://api.forvo.com/documentation/) and play the pronunciation upon each successful Review Item? WK’s pronunciations are good, but it’s nice to hear different voices once in a while.
Alternatively: Is there any interest in such a script being developed? If so, I can write it in my spare time eventually.
(I know the Forvo API isn’t free, but their Non-Profit $1/month pricing isn’t much.)
Might be worth considering if there’s a way to specify some favorite speakers. There’s a lot of low quality audio on forvo, so selecting random clips might not work well. But there are a few speakers who have posted a lot of high quality content, so favoring them when available would help.
It’s not just low quality that’s an issue, dialectal speech can be a problem too.
rfindley said... Might be worth considering if there's a way to specify some favorite speakers. There's a lot of low quality audio on forvo, so selecting random clips might not work well. But there are a few speakers who have posted a lot of high quality content, so favoring them when available would help.Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. It looks trivial to allow the user to input a descending list of preferred Forvo usernames and play the Forvo pronunciation of that user, if it exists, or else fall-back to the top-rated pronunciation.
P.S. I'm a big fan of your Userscripts too and will be reading through your code for inspiration/guidance :)
Syphus said... It's not just low quality that's an issue, dialectal speech can be a problem too.Hmm, that's a good point. Perhaps then it would be a good idea for me to manually go through some top-ranked Forvo users' profiles to see what dialect they speak with, and then hard-code it into the script so that users can have an option to select what dialect they prefer to hear, using classifications from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_dialects and can have the pronunciation's dialect be displayed in text on the page, if it's known.