WeDispatch 1.7.3: a button that plays nothing now says so
Unavailable voice previews announce themselves instead of staying silent, and each audio tier only offers voices from its own voice chain.
A short release, entirely devoted to one principle: when something is unavailable, the screen has to say so. A button that does not react suggests the product is broken, which is almost never what is happening, and nobody can be expected to tell the difference.
A missing preview announces itself
On the "Voices & playback" screen, every voice offers a few seconds of audio so you can hear it before choosing it. Those clips are produced in advance, and not every voice has one yet.
Until now, clicking a voice without a clip produced nothing at all: no sound, no message. Two very different situations looked identical on screen, "the clip has not been recorded yet" and "this voice does not work", when the second one is simply untrue: a voice without a preview reads your articles exactly like the others.
The preview button is now disabled and says why, in English as in French. And it re-enables itself as soon as the clip exists: nothing to refresh, nothing to report on your side.
Each tier only offers its own voices
The voice catalogue you see depends on the audio tier active on your account. That link is now strict: a voice chain whose catalogue has not been established yet offers no voices at all and rejects those that do not belong to it, rather than accepting one it would not know how to read.
In practice this changes nothing you can see today. It is a safeguard put in place ahead of the sovereign tier, whose European voice chain is being prepared: when it goes live, no voice from another tier will be able to slip into it. A sovereignty guarantee is only worth something if nothing can bypass it silently, including by accident.
Under the hood
Fifteen automated checks were added, one hundred and fourteen in total. One of them deserves a mention: it describes no current defect, it watches for a future change. Should an audio tier ever be connected to a voice chain whose catalogue has not been established, it fails immediately, before anything reaches production. In line with version 1.7.2, the principle is unchanged: what could become untrue one day should be checked today.
What this changes for you
Nothing to do. If you see a greyed-out preview button on one of your voices, it is the demo clip that is missing, not the voice: it voices your articles normally. The clip will appear without any action from you.
Give your articles a voice with WeDispatch
This blog is itself voiced by WeDispatch. Curious how it sounds on your content?
Book a demo