flynn089

Text to Speech (TTS) technology has come a long way in recent years and this is nowhere more evident than on the Read The Words website. I've just been having a look at the site and trying to decide whether it has real potential for helping EFL ESL students with their listening, reading and pronunciation. As an experiment I decided to select quite a challenging text and see what the site could do. I also decide to select a British English accent, as in the past I know that TTS systems had struggled more with UK accents than US ones, due to the wider range of sounds in UK English. Anyway, here are the results. The text is from Wikipedia.org at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_to_speech and is about the challenges of text normalisation in TTS. Click here to watch Elizabeth read the text to you. Or Listen using this media player This is the actual text you should be hearing: " Text normalization challenges The process of normalizing text is rarely straightforward. Texts are f...

I've been looking this week at Forvo , which is a kind of web 2.0 pronunciation site. The site allows users to request, and add audio clips of the pronunciation of different words from a huge range of languages , so if you want to know how a word is pronounced you can either do a quick easy search for the word and then listen to it, or if the word isn't already within the database, you can add it and request a pronunciation. The site also categorises words into lexical areas such as brands, acronyms, sports etc which is very handy You can also be helpful and add the pronunciation to words which have been requested in your language. The site offer free registration, but you can find words, request words and pronounce words without registering. The benefit of registration is that you'll be notified when someone pronounces your word for you. What I like about it It's a great idea and it's free Very easy to use interface Lots of different languages Sound clips load qui...

Phonetics Focus is a really wonderful new free resource produced by Cambridge English Online Ltd. Basically it is a collection of interactive multimedia Flash based games and resources that can be accessed through the CEO website at http://cambridgeenglishonline.com/Phonetics_Focus/ What is it? In all there are almost 20 different interactive tools all accessible through the one page. These vary from an interactive phonemic chart where users can click on the symbols to hear the sounds and so develop their knowledge of the chart and the phonemic alphabet, through to more fun games which involve shooting the correct sounds to make a word in a ‘duck shoot’ type game. What I liked about it All of the activity types are pretty intuitive as they draw on standards like hangman, odd one out, word searches etc and they all have clear instructions. Many of the games and quizzes also have more than one level so this isn’t just for beginners. Some of the really exceptional features are: ‘Record ...

This is a useful site if you are teaching pronunciation. Though it could take some time to load the first time you use it. There is a phonemic chart which has small audio clips of the phonemes along with video clips that show the mouth movements as the sounds are made. (Be warned, this is quite a big file) Open pronunciation chart You simply click on the mouth and then watch and listen. I’m not so sure how helpful seeing the mouth is with some of the sounds, but with some it could be quite helpful. Because the chart is a Flash (swf) file if you right click on it, you can ‘zoom in’ and this makes the view of the mouth much larger. You can even fill the whole screen with just one clip if you want to, though this looks a bit scary! If you use the menu at the side you can turn off the symbols and just have the video clips, so you could use this for a phonemic dictation activity. (Students listen and write down the phoneme they here) You could also use it to pronounce words while your stude...