Diacritiques

Some time ago, Kevin Marks told me about a strange little OS X application that comes with Apple Macs. It is called “Speak After Me”, and takes a bit of text, records the user speaking the text, cuts it up (the speech, not the user) into phonemes — at least that’s what the program calls them — and then maps a pitch contour to the transcription.

Here is a screenshot of Kevin saying “Coco is the queen of the space monkeys” (click on the image to enlarge). Highlighted in yellow is the transcription it generates, using a very odd phonemic (phonetic?) notation:

Not having a Mac, I don’t know if the program works for other languages than English. But even in English, it is clear that its phoneme inventory must be a weak point of the system: Written language to phoneme mapping just doesn’t work across all varieties of English. On the other hand, you apparently can edit the speech recording/transcription/pitch contour set, and the program also lets you export the data as a plain text file. It might be nice to play around with for a class of advanced ESL learners, or even in native-language education at the high school or post-secondary level.

According to Kevin, this is mainly a OS X demo application and part of the “developers’ install”, which is accessible to all Mac OS X users. Does anyone know more about it?

What’s wrong with CAPTCHAs, apart from the accessibility problem they create? This:

Note the snowclone in Erinn’s article title Unreadable captchas considered useless. This is a variant of the “X considered harmful” snowclone — clearly more widespread in the coder community than elsewhere — whose inventor is not Edsger Dijkstra, even though it does go back to his famous article of 1968 entitled Go To Statement Considered Harmful (Communications of the ACM, Vol. 11, No. 3, March 1968, pp. 147-148).

Via Erinn Clark.

You wouldn’t mind taking another look at this, would you?

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