Okay, so this update kind of took me by surprise. I was playing around with the audio support in the Matter Read It Later app, when I thought, “What one man can do, another can do.” (Still haven’t seen the movie that is a quote from). So I started playing around with AI text-to-speech service options and found something I rather liked. Then I wanted to be able to listen to the Westminster Confession when I go on walks so much that I just decided to pause all the other Relight projects and build this.
Anyway, currently the feature only works in the Westminster Confession. You’ll actually see the play button on other confessions (known issue #1 I guess) but, sad trombone, it won’t work. The plan is to release audio for all of the Westminster Standards in this release and then to slowly roll out support for all the other Relight resources in the coming months (because while the service I’m using to generate this audio is not expensive, it’s also not free).
Changelog
Added a play button to the Westminster Confession title area. This begins playback and begins an audio interface. More controls for things like speed and volume are available by tapping the up chevron icon.
’m planning to have the app scroll you down through the page as it reads out loud. This is not yet implemented, but will be before the first public release.
I do plan to likely add a scrubber so you can skip around in a given article. I’m not sure if I’ll add it for this first public release release or not.
Update: I’m now planning to no release this. I suspect it won’t be frequently used and the interface will be less cluttered if I don’t add it. If users really miss it, I can add it, though.
I’m still working through whether the app should advance you to the next chapter, and whether it should navigate you there or not—and how that will work. I’m not sure if this will be completely worked out in the first public release or not.
Some elements of the player UI are not finalized.
I plan to let you play a specific article within the lightbulb icon for that article, but this isn’t implemented yet (should be before public release, though).
Very cool! One thing I noticed in the recording for Chapter 1, Article 1, is that there’s a weirdly unnatural pause in the middle of a sentence. “propagating of the truth, and for PAUSE the more sure establishment”.
Yes, these seem to occur in aggressively long sentences. I’m going to be constantly on the prowl for better voices and ways to improve these, but this will probably be the voice that ships, at least initially.
This is a wonderful feature and I look forward to listening to the WCF during my walks too! Thank you!
However, I noticed that the audio playback button does not appear when accessing Relight via the Android’s ‘Add to Homescreen’ option of accessing this app. Any idea why? (See screenshot)
Well, I just tried adding the beta version of relight to my screen, and the audio feature works! So, you may disregard my original comment. Fantastic feature!
Fixed (I think) an issue that caused playback to skip multiple articles upon completion of one article.
Added toggles for Follow Along (which scrolls you to the article currently being read) and Auto Advance Chapter which will take you to the next chapter and start reading it.
There is a caveat here on the Auto Advance feature. Basically, browsers have a ton of built in security things to keep sites from autoplaying audio when the user doesn’t want audio to be played. This means that this feature breaks sometimes on certain browsers (though I suspect not completely consistently). The safest way to make sure that the audio continues to play back is to make sure that you leave the tab with the audio playing active.
This is an issue that should be resolved whenever we are able to release dedicated native apps, since I can handle playback with native API’s instead of doing everything through the browser.
When you click on the lightbulb icon for an article, there is now a dedicated play button next to the Share and Close icons.
Fixed overlapping issues when the user has Bottom Navbar enabled (on mobile).
Fixed an issue with the playback time remaining counter being wrong in bizarre ways (math is hard).
Fixed lots of fussy layout issues in the audio controls.
Auto-scrolling should be improved in virtually all use cases across the site.
I’m planning to get the Westminster catechisms converted to audio and implemented on the site, then assuming nothing is broken, this will likely go to production.
Quick update: the track-skipping issue was still persisting after this update, which you may have noticed if you tried it recently. But now it should be really fixed. Like for real. Why are you looking at me like that? I mean it.
Do you think you could sweet talk Ligonier into allowing you to use the Sinclair Ferguson audio for the Shorter and build out the auto voice for everything else?
