Narration production notes | Early years home play · Production_Notes

Status, 29 September 2026: scripts and optional original non-speech cues are released under the stated licences. No narrated speech is released. Twenty Australian English Polly candidates are stored only in the review-pending folder. A separate local Kokoro test sample was disposable and is not part of this pack.

Rights research for a possible future voice

Kokoro-82M publisher model card lists the model as Apache-2.0, explicitly welcomes real-world commercial deployment, and describes the training audio as permissive or non-copyrighted. Its associated voice list lists af_heart as American English. The locally downloaded model kokoro-v1_0.pth had SHA-256 496dba118d1a58f5f3db2efc88dbdc216e0483fc89fe6e47ee1f2c53f18ad1e4; voice file af_heart.pt had SHA-256 0ab5709b8ffab19bfd849cd11d98f75b60af7733253ad0d67b12382a102cb4ff. The cache revision was f3ff3571791e39611d31c381e3a41a3af07b4987.
Output-use boundary: A permissive model-weight licence and permission to deploy the model do not, by themselves, establish who owns each generated waveform or grant us every right needed to relicense one under CC BY 4.0. The model card does not state a separate explicit output-use grant. We therefore make no CC BY claim for an unreleased synthetic narration.
A Piper lessac voice model card links to Blizzard 2013 training-data terms that permit research use and exclude commercial purposes. That candidate was rejected.
Amazon Polly states that generated audio files can be stored and redistributed for any use case. The current AWS Service Terms, section 50.2 say AI-service output is Your Content, while noting that output may not be unique. The official voice list lists Australian English Olivia with neural and generative engines. These sources provide a clearer route for a future Australian English candidate, subject to the service terms that apply when it is made and clip-by-clip human review. After the account session was renewed, twenty Olivia neural candidate clips were made in ap-southeast-2 from the twenty original scripts. Each file has its own source-text hash, audio hash, engine, voice, region and encoding metadata in the local-only review-pending/polly-olivia-neural/candidate-manifest.json. That directory is Git-ignored and is absent from a clean clone. None has been relicensed or published as a classroom-ready recording.

Quality boundary

The local Kokoro test generated a WAV, but this agent's playback interface did not make audio available to hear. The same constraint applies to the Polly candidate clips. We cannot verify their Australian early-years pronunciation, pacing, clipped words or child-facing tone by listening. No narration should be published until a human listens to every clip against its exact script, checks vocabulary and accent for the intended Australian audience, and confirms a rights basis for the generated output. The scripts may instead be recorded by a consenting original human narrator whose recording rights are obtained for CC BY 4.0 distribution.

Mechanical screening found all twenty candidates to be valid 24 kHz mono MP3s with peaks below -7 dBFS and no decoded clipping. A local speech recogniser matched the scripts closely, but this is only a screen for missing words. One candidate, 06 Container match, transcribed “safe lids” as “safe leads” and needs particular human pronunciation review. The local-only review-pending/polly-olivia-neural/REVIEW_QUEUE.md lists all pending clips; it is Git-ignored and is absent from a clean clone.

The two released sounds are deterministic tones made from numbers by the included code. Their duration, frequency range, sample format, fades and peak level are checked mechanically; human listening is still pending. Neither tone should be placed under speech by default. The user controls device volume and can skip all sounds.