Vāgdhenu: A Sanskrit Chanting TTS System

https://prathosh.in/vagdhenu/

by subinalex • 10 days ago

212 54 10 days ago

prathosh.in

nopin• 6 days ago

This is so so so cool. the UX of the app could be better.

orsenthil• 6 days ago

This is Excellent!

bhargav• 6 days ago

Amazing tool and very accurate, even on some esoteric texts I tested. Wish it let me just dump an entire stotra :)

ultrasounder• 6 days ago

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 :-)

ks20482• 6 days ago

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?

sophrosyne42• 5 days ago

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.

sieve• 5 days ago

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.

prox• 5 days ago

Luckily a lot of research has gone into Vedic recitation from an academic perspective if someone would take up the mantle.

delta_p_delta_x3• 5 days ago

It'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.

graphcolorer• 5 days ago

Interestingly, 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• 5 days ago

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.

ks20482• 5 days ago

I 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• 5 days ago

Looks 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.

woozlewuzzle• 5 days ago

I'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• 5 days ago

I think they mean that the visual design of the site is vibe coded, as most LLMs use this style while making web pages.

waonderer• 5 days ago

The 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.

lordleft• 5 days ago

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!

dartharva2• 5 days ago

Automating pundits in family functions would be my first guess. Could be more convenient and reliable than having to invite some stranger just for recitation.

tinuviel2• 5 days ago

You 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.

devsda2• 5 days ago

I think complex Sanskrit words are difficult to roll off the tongue and pronounce if read in a dry manner specially if you don't already know the words or meaning, which unfortunately is true for the majority out there who want to read them, including myself.

Having a spoken reference that too as a chant makes it easy to recite the verses.

rramadass8• 5 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48955776

shash• 5 days ago

Learning and figuring out the meter and rhythm of a new passage? If you don’t have someone who knows to chant it for you…

Besides, it’s a fun exercise, so why not?

throwawaysjskdk• 5 days ago

Everything doesn’t need a use case. It’s simply cool.

zkmon5• 5 days ago

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.

dartharva2• 5 days 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• 5 days ago

Seems 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.

zkmon5• 5 days ago

That'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.

devsda2• 5 days ago

I have tried the word you mentioned along with few other words together and there were no issues.

It doesn't have to be a replacement. Anyone who has ever been in the physical presence of an expert reciting sanskrit verses knows that this can never replace that experience.

It will only make the language and the chants more accessible.

zkmon5• 5 days ago

I have tried the word you mentioned along with few other words together and there were no issues.

I have typed the word in English literals, and it made a horrible pronunciation of the word.

It will only make the language and the chants more accessible.

No, it will turn sacred chanting into an AI slop. Entirely due to desire of people wishing to make some quick bucks or cheap reputation.

rramadass8• 5 days ago

Yours is a very shortsighted and myopic view on the importance of using modern technology in order to maintain/enhance/propagate ancient cultural/linguistic knowledge which is losing its appeal in the "common populace".

This is another tool to help correct that balance.

The author seems a pretty knowledgeable person - https://prathosh.in/

His talk "The Non-negotiability of Shastra-s in Modern Science" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5Tp4gdQiTM

zkmon5• 5 days ago

You don't need to know about the person, to understand what is done here. This is no invention or profound deed. Anyone using the open-weights TTS models can do this. Talk about the overall goal.

Arun2009• 5 days ago

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.

This is not true at all. Live chanting, live pUjAs, etc. are still very much practiced. It's just that recorded versions also became available, making our lives richer.

The same applies to other art forms. E.g., bharatanATyam is still performed live, but we also have recorded performances. That is a good thing!

never_inline• 5 days ago

Why 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?

xerosanyam2• 5 days ago

Even if it was vibe-coded, does that matter? The result is solid. If it’s not to your taste, wait for the next release.

xerosanyam2• 5 days ago

love it!

rramadass8• 5 days ago

People 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• 5 days ago

Perhaps you could edit the submission to add this context?

rramadass8• 5 days ago

Sorry, am not the submitter so we will let it be.

febed• 5 days ago

Would be interesting to make a similar one for Tibetan chants.

katspaugh• 5 days ago

Can the same engine be extended to Pali for Buddhist suttas?

porridgeraisin• 5 days ago

Yes. 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• 5 days ago

BaaS: Bhatta as a Service.

nb: Bhatta is Sanskrit for priest.

collabs• 5 days ago

Congratulations 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.

Vāgdhenu: A Sanskrit Chanting TTS System

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