@Chloe-Mandarin_HSK6 this is on the development list!
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@Sonja-Mandarin-HSK_3 you are not alone! We are working on this and will hopefully fix it by tomorrow! In the meantime, I believe desktops are not affected. Sorry for the inconvenience!
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@Hack-Chinese-Daniel Hi Daniel. I haven’t studied in five days because I had been sick, so I don’t know how long this has been going on. I just started a study session and the automatic audio plays as soon as I see the characters? That is, before I have a chance to think for myself whether or not I know what the word sounds like. A temporary solution was to disable the automatic audio, but I liked it better when the audio would play automatically as soon as the pinyin was revealed.
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Hi @Marco_Mandarin-HSK_4 . Check your Basic Settings Review Mode (on the bottom) - I think you picked ‘Excel’ which plays audio up front. Switch to 4-click or 2-click and you should be good to go.
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Right now, there is no audio in Hack Chinese. We expect to have it back online in 1-2 days.
DETAILS
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We use Baidu TTS (text-to-speech) to create natural sounding audio for words and sentences in Hack Chinese. Today, for the first time ever, we hit our monthly limit on the amount of text that can be synthesized into audio. This means, right now, there is no audio in Hack Chinese.
After some research, we have discovered that upgrading our plan requires us to have a Chinese telephone number, a Chinese bank account, and register the company and an employee with the Chinese government. This will take some time. -
We are in the process of adding a backup source of audio. Google Cloud TTS (text to speech) was unacceptable when we started Hack Chinese three years ago – but today they have a new AI-based technology called WaveNet that sounds excellent. For users in China, selecting this audio source will require you to use a VPN (something most of you do anyway).
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We have already begun our transition to native audio, recorded by actual humans. For a select set of lists, native audio is online and working, but only for a select set of users. Given today’s issue, we are escalating the priority of this work.
Please reach out to me directly if you have any questions.
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@Max missed about a week of hack chinese as my work got busy, came back to… 800+ reviews 
and thought of your message here. Doing fairly well at reducing them down though, so not feeling that disheartened.
In other news, I’ve seen the LTL HSK 4 Hack Chinese packs is up and running! Something for me to dig into once I get through my backlog… 
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The pain is real. I try to set myself a good 30 minutes in those difficult times and just try and wipe them out in one!
Regarding the HSK lists - yes we’ve been digging deep and we aren’t far off finishing now 
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The new male audio sounds fantastic
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Hi All,
The new audio for words is mostly online. Shortly we will be re-enabling the ‘male/female’ and speed ‘slow/medium/fast’ settings (right now everyone is defaulting to male/medium).
We unfortunately have run into another issue: the way our audio data is loading is causing some study sessions to take too long to load, causing server crashes.
We are working on optimising this (and are confident it will be just as speedy as before), but in the meantime, selecting shorter duration study sessions of 6 minutes or less) seems to prevent the crashing.
Will report back more news when we have it.
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@Hack-Chinese-Daniel
It keeps giving me a large number of weak memories on the final screen, but on the dashboard it shows a much smaller number. I has never been like this before today
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Thanks for this, Phillip! This is now fixed and will be on the live server tomorrow. (Your data is OK, we just calculated one of the values that we display incorrectly).
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@Hack-Chinese-Daniel
When I start hackchinese on my laptop and go directly to “+” and try to add a word, a study session always begins automatically 
, I think with the second typed letter.
Just launched (or more accurately, re-launched): Dark Mode!
Hiya, Dark mode cuts off the very top of the characters - doesn’t happen for regular mode!
@Hack-Chinese-Daniel since the update I have over 100 weak memories but I cannot seem to study them, I keep getting pushed to new words. I also see in the custom lists one of the old options is missing. I think it was the option to specifically study weak memories.
Any ideas, or changes to settings I can make?
Thanks
Max
PS - dark mode also does the same for me, as above with Chloe.
Dark mode looks so nice 
And I think the new audio sounds more natural than the old audio. Not to mention how impressive it is to change out the whole audio system in basically a week!
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Hello Johan, welcome to the Flexi Fourm. Great to have you with us - and I love your profile picture!
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I like the new voice. Sometimes he sounds a bit “breathy” though, or maybe thats just my imagination?
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