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prosolis 24c3533e18 Give read-aloud a Portuguese voice, and a slower one
Phase 21's infra half. Two things the pt-PT pair needs from TTS, and one
thing every learner has wanted since Phase 11.

**A language is no longer a code change.** The handler knew exactly two
languages, named in the Config struct: English on TTS_ENDPOINT and Chinese
on TTS_ENDPOINT_ZH. Petal now discovers its Piper instances from the
environment — English keeps the unsuffixed pair it has always had, and
every other language is a TTS_ENDPOINT_<LANG>/TTS_VOICE_<LANG> pair — so
fr and es cost a compose service and two lines of .env. <LANG> is the base
tag, because an environment variable name cannot hold pt-PT's hyphen and
only one Portuguese model is loaded either way. A language configured by
halves is dropped rather than routed: half a configuration should reach
the client as "no voice here, use Web Speech", not as an instance that
errors on every tap. The startup line now names the voices it actually
resolved rather than the English endpoint it was handed — the same lesson
the dictionary line learned last week.

**pt_PT-tugão-medium is the only European voice Piper ships.** The other
five pt models in the catalogue are Brazilian, so the default anyone
reaches for is the wrong country — the same trap as `dictionary-pt`
packaging VERO, arriving through the catalogue rather than through the
model. Named explicitly in compose, with the query that checks it in the
deploy README.

**The slow replay** (SUGGESTIONS §5e) is `slow: true` on /api/tts, raising
Piper's length_scale to ~4/3. Piper stretches durations rather than
resampling, so it stays a voice instead of a groan. The pace is part of
the cache key — without it the slow replay of a word already heard at
normal speed would be served back at normal speed, which is the one
request where the difference is the whole point. 🐢 sits beside 🔊 on the
word card, the selection bubble and the garden flashcard; the Web Speech
fallback slows too, so the button means the same thing when Piper is down.

**And the other reading gets her own voice.** The `alsoIn` block — the
Portuguese sense of a word that is also English — now speaks in the pair's
locale, which the pack names (`locale`) rather than anything inferring it
from the letters. "comum" is spelled identically in both halves; a
detector would have to guess, and this is the same reason the gloss shows
both directions instead of picking one.

Tests: config discovery (both existing deployment shapes, half-configured
languages dropped, the pre-map voice defaults preserved), the slow scale
and its separate cache entry, pt routing on the base tag with pt-BR
landing on the European instance, and speech.ts's request body. The i18n
shape suite now asserts every pack names a speakable locale in its own
language — and that pt-PT's is not pt-BR.

Verified: go build/vet/test, tsc, vitest 125/125, vite build. Live smoke
against two fake Piper servers: en/pt × normal/slow all reached the right
instance at the right length_scale with four distinct cache entries, and
an unconfigured language still 404s.
2026-07-27 13:21:45 -07:00
prosolis ccb43e5a4d Phase 21: Petal learns to be an English+Portuguese pair
The plan said "Hunspell pt-PT vendored like en-US". Measuring that first is
what saved it: nspell expands affixes eagerly on construction, and European
Portuguese's 1,340 rules over 44,257 stems want over a gigabyte of browser
heap — ~340 MB for the first 12,000 entries, and no return at all after three
minutes on the whole file. So the expansion runs once at build time instead:
1,039,058 forms, 2.66 MB gzipped, read by the same nspell in 842 ms.

The obvious npm package would also have shipped the wrong language. Both
dictionary-pt and dictionary-pt-br carry VERO, the Brazilian word list, so
vendoring by name puts pt-BR spellings behind a pt-PT label — the drift
SUGGESTIONS §3 warns about, arriving through the packaging where no reviewer
can see it. The source is Projecto Natura's, and the build script now asserts
the fault lines (receção in, recepção out) before writing anything.

Spellcheck consults both dictionaries and flags only what both reject, which
is the no-detector answer to a pair with no script boundary. The word card
does the same in the other direction: "data" is a word in both languages, so
Petal shows both readings rather than guessing which she meant.

Writing the tests caught the one real bug — extendedAlphabet was a snapshot
while correct/suggest read live, and her dictionary arrives after English, so
every lookup would have resolved "cora" while the underlines were already
right.

Not done, and not claimed: the pack has not been read by a pt-PT speaker, and
the Piper voice is deferred with the deploy.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016y6gyuHkQXPiEuW8RGQyua
2026-07-27 12:43:02 -07:00