Why we do not ask your phone to read words aloud
On many sites, when you press the speaker, your own phone is asked to read the word. With Armenian, Georgian, Kazakh and Maldivian this almost always ends in silence: phones do not have such voices. That is why we prepare the sound in advance and put it on the site as a file — then everyone can hear it.
What happens when a phone is asked to read an Armenian word
Asking the phone to read a word aloud seems like a free solution: no file to record, and it can read anything. In practice one of three things happens, and all three are bad.
- Silence. There is no Armenian voice in the phone, and it simply does nothing. You press the speaker, nothing happens — and you decide the site is broken.
- The word is read in the wrong language. The phone takes the voice it has and reads the Armenian word by English rules. That is not “roughly right” — it is a completely different word.
- Different people get different results. On one phone the word sounds one way, on another differently, on a third not at all. Pronunciation cannot be learned from such sound.
How we did it
We prepared the sound in advance and put it right on the site. Words, letters, examples, dialogue lines — everything sits ready.
That is why it sounds the same for everyone: your phone model and what is installed on it do not matter. Even where the phone itself cannot read Armenian aloud at all, ours will be heard.
And hence the rule: no sound, no button. Not grey, not disabled — it simply is not there: so you can see at once what can be listened to and what cannot yet.
There is a price. Some words will never have a button: for Maldivian the recordings were assembled from old materials, and a word that was not found there can be got from nowhere.
Why this matters at all
We looked at what search shows for “Georgian alphabet with pronunciation”. The first five pages — and not one of them lets you listen to anything. A person asks directly about sound, and nobody in the results has any.
The same with Armenian, Maldivian, Sinhala and Tamil. Half the questions in these languages are “and how does it sound”, and there is almost nowhere to get an answer.
Frequently asked
Why do some words have no sound button?
Because we have no sound for that word. Asking the phone to read it for us is not something we will do: it will either stay silent or read it in the wrong language.
Why does a word always sound the same?
Because the sound is prepared in advance and sits on the site as a ready file. It is not reassembled on every press and does not depend on your phone — which is why it sounds the same for everyone, every time.
Can I download the sound?
You can listen right on the pages and in the app. A separate file download does not exist yet.