Forgive my ignorance; I'm not a Sanskrit speaker (Malayalam is my first language) -- but I love the sound of Sanskrit.
I have lots of questions: what's the use case for this? Primarily religious / liturgical? It also seems that the fact that this tool works means that any arbitrary Sanskrit sentence can be translated into a chant by some sort of procedure (dare I say algorithm)? I'm terribly curious and fascinated by this!
This must be insanely difficult to get right. I was not expecting such an impressive result from a site that looks so vibe coded! The look is underselling how good this is.
The TTS quality seems to be poor. I just entered a single word "jaganmaatham" and it failed to pronounce it.
What's the point anyway? If you really love your traditions, slokas and chanting, please keep it as natural as possible, instead of plasticizing it to the core.
This is third level of mechanizing the sacred rituals. First - we lost the live chanting due to recorded recitals with human voice. Then we lost the experience of presence due to online streaming. And now even human voice is lost - the broken chanting is generated. So, combined all together, you have a streaming of the rituals which was performed by recorded chanting that never really involved a human reading the sloka.
Just because we can pollute the world, we need not do it.
It was based on an existing TTS, IndicT5. I wonder how different is “Sanskrit Chanting” to languages it could already do, like Hindi. Is it largely the glyph—to-phoneme that needs relearning? Or pitch control? Or more?
The biggest problem with a lot of northern languages is the awful schwa deletion. Even the Marathi of Maharashtra is subject to it. Strangely, the Marathi of Thanjavur has far, far less of it from what little I have heard of it.
Sanskrit does not do schwa deletion. So engines must map the phonemes to Kannada/Telugu (which support the full complement of Sanskrit sounds) if they want to get somewhere. A lot of this can be solved if the backend supports ipa.
But this is for classical Sanskrit. Vedic recitation is too complex (and I know too little about it) to handle without a LOT of work.
There are sounds in sanskrit that don't exist in Hindi, including vocalizations that exist in Sanskrit which are omitted in Hindi for the same glyphs. Additionally, Sanskrit meter has pretty specific rules on which should be stressed and unstressed, when to have pitch changes, and the length of each sound.
Very nice implementation. I tried developing my own to practice Santhai(repeat thrice) to learn Upnishads and this tool would be at the center of my workflow. A locally installable version would be even great! Kudos. Dhanyosmi :-)
I have lots of questions: what's the use case for this? Primarily religious / liturgical? It also seems that the fact that this tool works means that any arbitrary Sanskrit sentence can be translated into a chant by some sort of procedure (dare I say algorithm)? I'm terribly curious and fascinated by this!
From what I can tell, it used 5.3 hours of single voice fine-tune data.
What's the point anyway? If you really love your traditions, slokas and chanting, please keep it as natural as possible, instead of plasticizing it to the core.
This is third level of mechanizing the sacred rituals. First - we lost the live chanting due to recorded recitals with human voice. Then we lost the experience of presence due to online streaming. And now even human voice is lost - the broken chanting is generated. So, combined all together, you have a streaming of the rituals which was performed by recorded chanting that never really involved a human reading the sloka.
Just because we can pollute the world, we need not do it.
Sanskrit does not do schwa deletion. So engines must map the phonemes to Kannada/Telugu (which support the full complement of Sanskrit sounds) if they want to get somewhere. A lot of this can be solved if the backend supports ipa.
But this is for classical Sanskrit. Vedic recitation is too complex (and I know too little about it) to handle without a LOT of work.