Voice / TTS
The Dhamma was originally an oral teaching. — AN 5.209
Live demo — voice mode starts automatically via a URL parameter, no clicking required (the floating player at the bottom is the point here, not the reader text behind it):
5 ways to activate Voice Mode
- Click the Voice link at the top of the page (next to En, Ru, etc.).
- Click the 🔉 icon to the left of the text's title.
- Click any Pali or translation sentence to highlight it, then click the Play button that appears bottom-right.
- Hover/tap before or after a line to reveal a ✦ link, then choose "Listen".
- Press Alt+R (Option+R on Mac).
Player
- Controls — Play/Pause, previous/next sentence.
- Navigation — pause, click a Pali sentence to highlight it, press Play to resume from there.
- Mode — what is read: Pāḷi / Pāḷi + translation / translation / translation + Pāḷi.
- Speed — the speed button opens a slider with presets; the default for Pāḷi is 0.7× ("normal" for the DG voice).
- Settings (⚙) — auto-scroll, autoplay, pause between sentences and Voice settings.
Voices: three kinds
In ⚙ → Voice settings you choose the voice separately for Pāḷi and for the translation, in three steps: kind → language → voice. The ▶ next to a voice plays a short sample (DG voices).
No phone or computer has a Pāḷi voice, so we made our own. They are in beta and still being tuned by ear, sound by sound.
DG Voice — our own free neural voices (default)
They run on our server: no key, no limits, nothing to install. Each one can also be downloaded to your device and then reads without internet.
- Pāḷi
- Pratham ♂ · Piper (default): a neural voice (Piper) that reads Pāḷi through our own Pāḷi pronunciation rules (letters → sounds, stress, long vowels), tuned in blind listening rounds. Beta.
- o Dhamma.Gift ♂ · beta: a voice trained on real Pāḷi readings. Its pronunciation is closer to living Pāḷi, but the sound is still rough. A new version is on the way.
- Priyamvada ♀ · Piper: a female voice with the same rules.
- English: Yojanāni ♂ (default), Alan ♂ (UK), Kathleen ♀ (US).
- Russian: Puriso ♂ (default), o Dhamma.Gift ♂ · beta, Irina ♀.
- Pāḷi words inside a translation (sutta, Dhamma, bhikkhu, names) are read the Pāḷi way. Abbreviations are spelled out (Ven. → Venerable, SN 56.11 → Saṁyutta Nikāya 56, 11). Russian words get the right stress, and ё where the text prints е.
- The next sentences are prepared while one is playing, so there are no gaps between them.
Offline: download a DG voice
In Voice settings → DG Voice, each voice in the list has a ⬇ icon with its download size. Once downloaded, the voice reads on your device with no network, on the reader and on the Memo page. The 🗑 icon deletes it. The English and Russian voices download a shared pronunciation module with the first of them. The o Dhamma.Gift voices are the owner's own and are released under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
Google — cloud voices with a free quota
High-quality cloud voices. Pāḷi is read by a Punjabi (pa-IN) voice through Devanagari with our own fixes. They work with a built-in trial key; for regular use enter your own Google API key (see below), whose free monthly quota is generous for personal use.
Built-in — your device's voices, work offline
Uses the speech synthesis of your system or browser: no internet needed, nothing is sent anywhere. There is no Pāḷi voice in any system, so install one of Sanskrit (India), Hindi (India), Nepali or Indonesian for the closest pronunciation; if none is installed, English is used as a fallback.
- Android — Settings → Accessibility → Text-to-speech output, then install voice data for the language: Android help.
- iPhone / iPad — Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → Voices: Apple help.
- Mac — System Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → System voice → Manage Voices: Apple help.
- Windows — Settings → Time & language → Speech → Manage voices → Add voices: Microsoft help.
After installing a voice, reload the page and pick it in Voice settings → Built-in.
A-B loop — repeat a passage for memorization
The AB button next to the player is a separate tool layered on top of normal playback: pick a start and end point in the text, and the player repeats just that passage, with a pause between repeats and a repeat limit (or infinite).
- Click AB — if a line was already selected, it immediately becomes point A and the panel waits for you to click a line for point B; if nothing was selected, click a line for A first, then for B. As soon as both points are set, the loop starts automatically.
- Pause (sec) — how long to wait between repeats.
- Repeat count — defaults to ∞ (infinite); type your own number and the loop stops on its own once it's done.
- To move a point, click it again and pick a new line. To clear a point, right-click (or long-press on phones) directly on the A or B button.
- The passage between the two points is marked in the text with a vertical bar on the left.
Hotkeys
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Alt+R | Toggle Voice Mode |
| S | Toggle autoscroll |
| Space | Play / Pause |
| ← → or ↑ ↓ | Previous / Next segment |
| 1 | Mode: Pāḷi |
| 2 | Mode: Pāḷi + Translation |
| 3 | Mode: Translation |
| 4 | Mode: Translation + Pāḷi |
| + / - | Increase / decrease speed |
| R | Reset speed to default |
If "Autoscroll" is off (the S key, or the toggle in the player settings), Space and the arrow keys stop responding to player control — that's expected behavior, not a bug. The 1–4 keys and +/- always work, regardless of autoscroll.
Panel footer
- Voice settings — kinds of voices, languages and voices, samples, the Google API key.
- File — a link to an audio file, when one exists for that text.
- Help ? — this page.
Google API key (optional)
Only for the Google voices, when the trial key isn't enough. Create a project in Google Cloud, enable the Text-to-Speech API and create an API key (how to start); paste it in Voice settings → Google API Key. Free monthly limits and prices: Google Cloud pricing. By default translations use the cheaper Standard voices, Pāḷi a premium one.
Whole texts in MP3
For some texts, a Listen in MP3 line under the text gives the whole sutta as one file, in Pāḷi and in the translation, read by the DG voices, with the translator named. The Vinaya's two Vibhaṅgas have audio as well: Pāḷi for 347 rules and Russian for 34.
MP3 for the Memo page
On the Memo page the ⬇ button saves the text as one MP3 in the voice you chose: with the DG voice the pauses between lines can be of any length (Google's are limited to 10 seconds).