Little update… we’re reworking the catalogue page.
Ok so it will have these features:
– Reworked Youtube catalogue with ~50 curated channels for each language that you can watch on LR.
– Reworked ‘TurtleTube’ lists that have better videos.
– Might try running Whisper ASR for better subtitling on these channels when manual (human) subs are not available, or use an ML model to break up the automatic captions nicer.
– A page for all the good books from Gutenburg (remove the chaff), imported with images, and high-quality TTS. Mostly this will benefit English learners. Will see what other sites we can go to for books, maybe lib.ru for Russian, other languages will need to research.
– Some of the classics we will rewrite in simpler language (chatGPT) to make them more digestable for learners. Tech note: We are doing working with ‘plain text’ format mostly, with some markdown support for images and headings. The text from the Gutenberg books will be in a repo, so if someone wants to make a correction of change, they can.
– Items in the catalogue will generally have a vocabulary score so you can get an idea of the difficulty you will encounter on trying to read it.
– Importing the FSI / DLI courses (will try to contact https://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/)… these courses are old but solid gold. Audio will have ASR, so you can navigate through the cassettes with keys like subtitles, and dictionary/saving will work. The books will stay as scanned PDFs, OCR is just too much work, and the old typewritter style has it’s charm.
– What else… video file player should get a bit of an overhaul, will see if I can make speech recognition work for local video files.
– Imported texts will be saved for later reading and shown in a list. I’m also going to hook up the ability to upload an audiobook file/archieve, and LR will process it with speech recognition.
– Last thing, seems small but could turn out to be key: all items in the catalogue will be composable into lists, the idea is that you can make playlists of items (including texts which you uploaded), which you can share as a lesson.
Will have early version with gutenburg books online shortly. 
