The FirstVoices development team has been working hard on the new FirstVoices release. All new updates have been prompted by the hard-working Language Teams and community members, whose valuable feedback, ideas and suggestions have been crucial in making FirstVoices a better platform.

If you have questions about any of the updates listed below, or have ideas for ways to improve FirstVoices, please contact us at: hello@firstvoices.com

What’s new?

New photos in the Shared Media Library

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Next time you browse the Shared Media Library in the FirstVoices dashboard, you’ll see 126 new photos available for use on any language site. These are public domain images that were gathered by the FPCC Mentor-Apprentice Program for use in language learning. They include both historical and modern photographs of Indigenous people, maps, places, and activities. These photos are available to illustrate your dictionary entries, songs, stories, and custom pages. Let us know how you are using them!

• Knowledge Base article: Shared Media Library

New FirstVoices Apps

Two FirstVoices teams have launched new apps!

• Install the Kwadacha Tsek'ene app

• Install the Tillicum Lelum app

• See the full list of available apps: FirstVoices.com/apps

Want an app for your language site?

Contact hello@firstvoices.com to get started. All you need is a public FirstVoices site and a logo. Recommended logo size is 512 x 512 pixels, but we can make it work with a minimum size of 200 x 200 pixels.

Note that even with a public FirstVoices site, you can set any of your content to “Members” visibility. For example, some teams are choosing to make most of their dictionary public while keeping stories and songs private for logged-in site members only. This is one way to have an app while still keeping language recordings private within your community when needed.

What’s improved?

Bug fixes

• Thumbnails for transparent images. These now have white backgrounds instead of black.

• Page loading fixes. Pages no longer display the “loading” animation forever when hitting the back button from the sign-in form, or visiting a direct link to a private page while not logged in.

Data recovery

• We recently recovered a few dozen older audio files that had been marked as images on the old FirstVoices system. These are now available as new audio files for affected teams, and can be browsed and selected in the dashboard as usual.

General improvements

• In the dashboard, the word and phrase details views now include the created by and last modified by user information

• Games load faster now, due to image optimizations

• Error messages no longer redirect users to an error page, and instead show in place. You may have seen this in action if you visited http://FirstVoices.com during our temporary search outage last Thursday, March 20! Thank you for your patience while we got things running again. Did you notice that you can now reload the page to check whether the error has been resolved?

Knowledge Base updates

• New page: Using Reports covers how to see reports about your uploaded data, including dictionary entries that are missing audio, recently added words, unpublished (team-only) dictionary entries, and more.

What’s next?

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