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Vāgdhenu — Sanskrit Śloka-to-Chant TTS

▲ 212 points • 60 comments • by subinalex • 4mo ago • HN discussion ↗

Pangram verdict · v3.3

We believe that the document contains a mix of AI-assisted and human-written content

31 %

AI likelihood · overall

Mixed
64% human-written 0% AI-generated
SEGMENTS · HUMAN 2 of 3
SEGMENTS · AI 0 of 3
WORD COUNT 442
PEAK AI % 62% · §3
Analyzed
Jul 18
backend: pangram/v3.3
Segments scanned
3 windows
avg 147 words each
Distribution
64 / 0%
human / AI fraction
Verdict
Mixed
Pangram v3.3

Article text · 442 words · 3 segments analyzed

Human AI-generated
§1 Human · 12%

Try it Paste a Sanskrit verse in any Indian script — the meter is detected automatically. First chant takes ~10–60s while the model warms up. If the demo doesn't load, use the backup demo ↗.

Listen — sample chants Six vṛttas rendered by this system — including verses from the shipped deployments. vasantatilakā Mahābhārata Tātparya Nirṇaya · 1.1 नारायणाय परिपूर्णगुणार्णवाय विश्वोदयस्थितिलयोन्नियतिप्रदाय ।ज्ञानप्रदाय विबुधासुरसौख्यदुःखसत्कारणाय वितताय नमोनमस्ते śārdūlavikrīḍita Śrīmad Bhāgavatam · 1.1.2 जन्माद्यस्य यतोऽन्वयादितरतश्चार्थेष्वभिज्ञः स्वराट् तेने ब्रह्म हृदा य आदिकवये मुह्यन्ति यं सूरयः। तेजोवारिमृदां यथा विनिमयो यत्र त्रिसर्गो मृषा धाम्ना स्वेन सदा निरस्तकुहकं सत्यं परं धीमहि anuṣṭubh Śrīmad Bhāgavatam · 1.1.5 नैमिषेऽनिमिषक्षेत्रे ऋषयः शौनकादयः। सत्रं स्वर्गाय लोकाय सहस्रसममासत vaṃśastha Śrīmad Bhāgavatam · 1.3.5 पश्यन्त्यदो रूपमदभ्रचक्षुषः सहस्रपादोरुभुजाननाद्भुतम्।

§2 Human · 16%

सहस्रमूर्धश्रवणाक्षिनासिकं सहस्रमौल्यम्बरकुण्डलोल्लसत् drutavilambita Śrīmad Bhāgavatam · 1.1.4 निगमकल्पतरोर्गलितं फलं शुकमुखादमृतद्रवसंयुतम्। पिबत भागवतं रसमालयं मुहुरहो रसिका भुवि भावुकाः mālinī Narasiṃha stuti · retroflex tongue-twister हठलुठ दल घिष्टोत्कण्ठदष्टोष्ठ विद्युत् सटशठ कठिनोरः पीठभित्सुष्ठुनिष्ठाम् ।पठतिनुतव कण्ठाधिष्ठ घोरान्त्रमाला दह दह नरसिंहासह्यवीर्याहितं मे ॥

Get the app These recitations power a free app for the complete Śrīmad Bhāgavatam. ॥ भागवतवाणी ॥ Bhāgavata-VāNi The complete Śrīmad Bhāgavatam — all 12 skandhas — with synced audio recitation and line-by-line karaoke highlighting, in 10 Indian scripts. Search any verse in any script, traditional indices, works fully offline. Free, no ads.

Practise with it Vāgdhenu's chants power a companion tool that listens to you. ॥ वाग्बोधिनी ॥ 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.

§3 Mixed · 62%

For classical (laukika) Sanskrit.

About Vāgdhenu maps a metrical verse to its chanted pārāyaṇa recitation. Its voice is a flow-matching TTS backbone retrained on a purpose-recorded, carefully designed single-speaker Sanskrit chant corpus (~5 hours), with a further voice-steering retrain; the neural vocoder is likewise fine-tuned for the chant register. Around the trained model sits the machinery a faithful Sanskrit chant pipeline needs: a script-aware frontend that routes Sanskrit through Kannada orthography (avoiding the Hindi schwa-deletion that Devanagari triggers); visarga sandhi with the jihvāmūlīya and upadhmānīya allophones; the aspiration contrast; the three sibilants and the full retroflex series kept distinct; homorganic anusvāra and vocalic ṝ; and a vṛtta-aware mechanism that detects the meter and selects a matched reference under the half-reference rule. The retrained model reaches an expert MOS of about 4.6, and dense conjuncts — including retroflex aspirates — render correctly, the class earlier architectures could not crack.

Deployments This system produced two corpora at scale. ● Mahābhārata Tātparya Nirṇaya — 32 chapters, 5,183 verses (~17.5h) · video series ↗ ● Śrīmad Bhāgavatam — ~18,000 verses across 12 books · karaoke-video series ↗