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Vāgdhenu: A Sanskrit Chanting TTS System
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- nopin 3mo agoThis is so so so cool. the UX of the app could be better.
- orsenthil 3mo agoThis is Excellent!
- _alternator_ 3mo ago[dead]
- bhargav 3mo agoAmazing tool and very accurate, even on some esoteric texts I tested. Wish it let me just dump an entire stotra :)
- ultrasounder 3mo agoVery 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 :-)
- ks2048 3mo agoIt 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?
- sophrosyne42 3mo agoThere 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.
- sieve 3mo agoThe 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.
- prox 3mo agoLuckily a lot of research has gone into Vedic recitation from an academic perspective if someone would take up the mantle.
- delta_p_delta_x 3mo agoIt's pretty funny reading comments on social media by north Indians whenever something on Sanskrit is posted. 'It's Ram, not Rama, it's yog, not yoga'... And they have no idea what schwa deletion is.
- ashishb 3mo ago> It's Ram, not Rama, it's yog, not yoga'... And they have no idea what schwa deletion is. It is neither. The fundamental issue is that there is no way to represent the schwa sound in English[1]. All of a,e,i,o,u have been used to communicate the schwa (or schwa-like) sound in English. - The `a` in about - The `e` in taken - The `i` in cousin - The `o` in button - The `u` in upon 1 - https://ashishb.net/linguistics/schwa/ https://ashishb.net/linguistics/schwa/
- delta_p_delta_x 3mo agoI wouldn't say 'neither', because by your own example, 'a' in English can represent ⟨ə⟩. That every other vowel letter also can is English's low level of phoneticism with respect to the script it uses. Many other languages using the Latin script (German, Italian, Finnish) don't have this problem, what you see is what get. Oddly enough amongst the Indic languages, Tamil has precisely the same problem: க, ப, ட may be voiced or voiceless plosives depending on context. Sanskrit loanwords in Tamil are typically pronounced very differently compared to their original in Sanskrit, or even in Telugu. Personally when transliterating any Indic language I tend to use ISO-15919, and in that scheme, it is Rāma, and 'a' represents the schwa. Or Rāmaḥ, Rāmam, Rāmē, or Rāmasya, whichever grammatical attachment is appropriate.
- graphcolorer 3mo agoInterestingly, the paper says that the glyph to phoneme conversion is lossy for Hindi (Devanagari) script due to schwa deletion, so one of the key innovations here is that the Sanskrit is first transliterated into Kannada before TTS.
- sebmellen 3mo agoThis 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.
- woozlewuzzle 3mo agoI'm curious what exactly makes this vibe-coded? I've noticed a lot of people seem quick to dismiss something as vibe-coded these days.
- amunozo 3mo agoI think they mean that the visual design of the site is vibe coded, as most LLMs use this style while making web pages.
- waonderer 3mo agoThe font, the colors, and the design is so similar to what an LLM will choose. This is most likely done by claude as per the aesthetics. Every AI has its own aesthetics as well.
- ks2048 3mo agoI was put off by the vibed-design, but everything looks well done and well-explained. From what I can tell, it used 5.3 hours of single voice fine-tune data.
- aitchnyu 3mo agoLooks perfectly functional and clear to the eyes for me. They also included a warning to not background/unfocus the tab on a mobile device so that our generation job (on the cloud AFAICT) doesnt get cancelled.
- lordleft 3mo agoForgive 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!
- dartharva 3mo agoAutomating pundits in family functions would be my first guess. Could be more convenient and reliable than having to invite some stranger just for recitation.
- tinuviel 3mo agoYou should ask yourself - would most christians prefer baptism in a bathtubs at home or drive in weddings for convenience? No? Exactly. Hindu Vedic pandits and priests who come in and run priestly events and functions at Hindu homes are usually well known within their communities are not treated as strangers and neither is there an element of inconvenience. If anything their absence adds an element of inconvenience. For one most rituals in sanskrit are available on youtube for those who want to diy. But most discerning Hindus prefer the real thing. Same as Christians.
- aprilthird2021 3mo agoCome on be so for real right now? I have been to many Hindu events, and the pandit is really just there to make things official and say the words. 90% of attendees don't know what he's actually saying. 80% have never met him or his associates. Now you can't automate him either. His presence is there because religious rituals and practice and tradition mandate his presence, but if you could just play the chants over a speaker and have people understand and follow the ritual instructions some other way, nothing would really change. For what it's worth, people can and do use AI visuals and sermons in Christianity as well
- zkmon 3mo agoThe 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.
- dartharva 3mo ago>If you really love your traditions, slokas and chanting Most people don't. Slokas and chanting are just traditions we do begrudgingly to enable the actual social objectives (family bonding, etc) of the rituals; you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who actually understands them, even if they have it memorized by heart. I'd say automating the recitation would be quite a good sell for most families, it gives a more convenient and reliable option in place of having to invite strangers over (and reinforcing caste roles) just for that.
- totetsu 3mo agoSeems like its point is to help people practice themselves. > Vāgbodhinī A Sanskrit chant tutor. Paste any śloka (or prose) in any script, hear its metre-aware reference chant rendered by Vāgdhenu, then chant along — a Sanskrit speech model scores every syllable and shows you what to fix. For classical (laukika) Sanskrit.
- zkmon 3mo agoThat's how they will present it. But the direction is clear. It can replace a human chanting professional. If it can, it will. The future is not far off where an AI bot will interact with the users, asking their family name etc and weave it into the chanting.
- devsda 3mo ago
- never_inline 3mo agoWhy does the visarga "echo" at the end of the verse? A mixed IAST - HK transliteration on the front page like "Bhāgavata-VāNi" does not inspire confidence either. Is it vibed?
- xerosanyam 3mo agoEven if it was vibe-coded, does that matter? The result is solid. If it’s not to your taste, wait for the next release.
- girishr 3mo ago[dead]
- xerosanyam 3mo agolove it!
- rramadass 3mo agoPeople seem to be making all sorts of assumptions/conjectures about the project and confusing themselves without reading the paper explaining the project (linked to in the site itself); From the introduction; Classical Sanskrit recitation, parāyaṇa, is a chanted rather than a read register. A faithful synthesizer must hold long vowels, sustain a terminal visarga, articulate retroflex and aspirated consonants, render dense consonant conjuncts cleanly, and respect the metrical structure of the verse. None of these is well served by general-purpose text-to-speech, and there is essentially no chant-domain training data available off the shelf. The problem is therefore doubly hard: it is low-resource, and the target prosody is a specialized melodic contour rather than ordinary read speech. This report describes a system, Vāgdhenu, that solves the practical version of this problem well enough to ship two large deployments, and it documents the design decisions, the dead ends, and the one negative result that turned out to be the most useful finding. We do not claim a new model. We claim an honest account of what it takes to build a faithful Sanskrit chant pipeline on top of current open backbones, what works, and what is architecturally out of reach. Our framing is that of an experience report. The evidence we offer is the comparative lineage across architecture families, a reproducible production system, two shipped artifacts at real scale, and a public release of code, weights, data, and a live demonstration. Formal listening studies are limited to expert evaluation, which we state plainly and treat as a limitation rather than a result.
- vishnugupta 3mo agoPerhaps you could edit the submission to add this context?
- rramadass 3mo agoSorry, am not the submitter so we will let it be.
- febed 3mo agoWould be interesting to make a similar one for Tibetan chants.
- katspaugh 3mo agoCan the same engine be extended to Pali for Buddhist suttas?
- porridgeraisin 3mo agoYes. The dhammapada uses a lot of Anushthubh chandas, which is an option in the website. However, the language differences between pali and sanskrit are enough to make TTS trip up. E.g only one "s" variant, and karma -> kamma, etc,. If you finetuned on pali a little bit it should work fine.
- woadwarrior01 3mo agoBaaS: Bhatta as a Service. nb: Bhatta is Sanskrit for priest.
- collabs 3mo agoCongratulations on launching! I just tried this यं ब्रह्मा वरुणेन्द्ररुद्रमरुत: स्तुन्वन्ति दिव्यै: स्तवै- र्वेदै: साङ्गपदक्रमोपनिषदैर्गायन्ति यं सामगा: । ध्यानावस्थिततद्गतेन मनसा पश्यन्ति यं योगिनो यस्यान्तं न विदु: सुरासुरगणा देवाय तस्मै नम: ॥ Interestingly, the word ब्रह्मा which should say Brahmaaaa says baa. Please take a look.