If you want to align an audio book in a language that is not yet supported by the g2p library, you will have to write your own g2p mapping for that language.
The g2p library and its documentation.
The 7-part blog post on creating g2p mappings on the Mother Tongues Blog.
Once you have created a g2p mapping for your language, please consider contributing it to the project so others can also benefit from your work!
Manipulating the text and/or audio data that you are trying to align can sometimes produce longer, more accurate ReadAlongs, that throw less errors when aligning. While some of the most successful techniques we have tried are outlined here, you may also need to customize your pre-processing to suit your specific data.
Adding 1 second segments of silence in between phrases or paragraphs sometimes improves the performance of the aligner. We do this using the Pydub library which can be pip-installed. Keep in mind that Pydub uses milliseconds.
If your data is currently 1 audio file, you will need to split it into segments where you want to put the silences.
ten_seconds = 10 * 1000
first_10_seconds = soundtrack[:ten_seconds]
last_5_seconds = soundtrack[-5000:]
Once you have your segments, create an MP3 file containing only 1 second of silence.
from pydub import AudioSegment
wfile = "appended_1000ms.mp3"
silence = AudioSegment.silent(duration=1000)
soundtrack = silence
Then you loop the audio files you want to append (segments and silence).
seg = AudioSegment.from_mp3(mp3file)
soundtrack = soundtrack + silence + seg
Write the soundtrack file as an MP3. This will then be the audio input for your Read-Along.
soundtrack.export(wfile, format="mp3")
ReadAlong Studio cannot align numbers written as digits (ex. “123”). Instead, you will need to write them out (ex. “one two three” or “one hundred and twenty three”) depending on how they are read in your audio file.
If you have lots of data, and the numbers are spoken in English (or any of their supported languages), consider adding a library like num2words to your pre-processing.
num2words 123456789
one hundred and twenty-three million, four hundred and fifty-six thousand, seven hundred and eighty-nine