Has anyone else seen / had a go with AI Chinese? It reminds me quite a lot of the Rosetta Stone speech recognition (especially the sound prompting you to speak).

http://www.aichinese.com/

It seems like it could be a very cool addition to the online learning suite. I remember something like this being suggested on the Skritter forum, and I have complete faith in the team's ability to code something at least as good for Skritter! :-D

In the meantime, I think AI Chinese might be worth the $9 a month.

I've always been pretty disappointed by speech recognition on computers :s. The technology isn't good enough to do anything properly useful that isn't gimmicky or fails completely.

I guess there's some merit in the program for complete beginners who don't want to spend money on a teacher, but surely your level is far above that aeriph?

Yeah, I've been playing around with the free trial. For one thing, it doesn't seem to work in Linux, so I had to boot Windows to try it. It's not really what I wanted, which was to import a vocabulary list, and then go through it by speaking rather than typing pinyin. If nothing else it would speed-up going through flashcards.

If this was a part of Skritter it would be great, but as a stand-alone tool it's not so good.

Byzanti, my level's not that high that I couldn't do with some pronunciation practice :-P

Hey, you probably already speak to a clearer standard than half the Chinese. "sisi块钱“ ”什么！？“”我suo的si这sisisi块钱". Uh huh.

don't know how it compares, but there is a free program called Speak good Chinese - http://speakgoodchinese.org/ - that is very similar.

I keep pointing out that I could probably whip something like this up pretty quickly and have it be totally cool, and others keep pointing out that not only does everything take longer than I think it will, but that not many people have shown interest in it even when I rave about how cool it would be. So it yet lies crushed at the bottom of the pile.

It's true that voice recognition (or at least anything I've seen) isn't really up to par with being an accurate measurable study tool. But the way I look at it isn't so much the accuracy of the recognition, but the fact it forces you to speak to complete the prompt.

I know me and probably others have told themselves they are going to say every prompt out loud to practice speaking. Does this happen? I'd guess less than we'd all like. Especially when you're flying through them at epic speeds.

So having a prompt with even a mediocre recognition engine behind it would at least require the user to make some noise that is in the realm of what it was supposed to sound like. Or at least be smart enough to reject incorrect leading consonants and grunts of anger then repeat the correct audio for the user to match.

In short, it gets people thinking out loud rather than saying it silently in their head. The sounds we're thinking don't always vocalize the way we'd like.

"I know me and probably others have told themselves they are going to say every prompt out loud to practice speaking. Does this happen? I'd guess less than we'd all like. Especially when you're flying through them at epic speeds. "

I don't know, I've certainly got in the habit of it. I then after hit show pinyin to see if I've got it right. I have to force myself to be quiet when studying on a train or someplace... But it just feels wrong...

I usually mutter to myself the pronunciation. For absurdly simple ones I don't, but for the rest I do. Since at the moment I am not living alone, if someone is in the room while I am Skrittering, it can get a little odd.

I usually Skritter in the office while George is sitting behind me working, so I don't say the prompts out loud. But whenever I see a bō, I yell, 'BŌŌŌŌŌ!' I can't help it any more: http://www.sinoglot.com/bjs/2008/02/where-not-to-look-for-beginning-mandarin-lessons/ (listen to #1)
George invariably also bō's.

@Nick

I laughed so hard my face hurts. I don't know if that is a well known clip or not, but I hadn't seen it yet. That bo1 just replaced my old favorite. My old favorite was the bing1 on Skritter. The bing1 on Skritter is yelled with such overdone enthusiasm that I couldn't help but let out with a biiiiing!. That bo1 just replaced it, though.

Hello All,

I noticed there are quite a few links come through Skritter.com and realized it was from this post. Here I am to hopefully answer some of the questions. Nick, I hope you don't mind.:)

Byzanti and mcfarljw, voice recognition works like training a child to understand languages. The quality of voice recognition highly relies on training data.Say, if you never heard a word 你好, you wouldn't recognize it when you first hear it. After being fed thousands of times for different people saying it, you know what it is 你好(getting the gender, age factors all out). AIChinese.com is trained with the most speech data (both native and non-native speakers). Therefore we're confident it is the best in the world so far. One number: only in the past 6 months, some 400,000 speech data of non-native speakers have been fed into training the engine. Famous institutes like Cambridge University, Open University are using our engine in their Chinese program. Other factors normally affect the accuracy is the volume of microphone and noise level. Please feel free to have a go and let me know how you think.

aeriph, would you please let me know what's wrong when you used it on linux? Thanks! We have tested it on Ubuntu and it works well. I would consult the team for further details.

Finally, about the "say every prompt out loud to practice speaking", to be honest, I think it is really up to individuals. During our trial with Open University(remote learning-all adults), it quickly divided into two extremes: one group users keep up practicing so frequently, the other signed up and maybe just practice once with one lesson or two. At the end of the trial, we analyze the data with the teachers . All frequent users made significant progress on their pronunciation, especially tones.

Again you guys are more than welcome to try it out. Any comments and advices are more than welcome. Of course, you can direct these to aichinese@aispeech.com. Thanks!


Best regards, AIChinese team @AISpeech
www.aichinese.com

I gave it a go and went through the first 5 lesson in about 10 minutes. I blasted through them quickly and for 95% of them clicked record before the example voice could say it first. It was very accurate at picking up the tones, but I don't feel like it really provided me with any information about my speaking I didn't already know. I got higher marks than I would have thought, so I guess that's kudos to Skritter for blasting the audio in my ears every time I review words haha. Yes occasionally I flubbed some tones when trying to quickly spout off a sentence, but I knew what I did wrong before it finished processing the results.

The grading of the initials and finals is a cool idea, but I spouted off a very American accented "Shanghai" with the correct tones and it seemed pleased with it along with a few others.

So I'm going to have to stick by my original statement that it was mostly good for forcing me to say it.

A very useful tool. I think it can be used to supplement normal pronunciation training, especially for beginners to master tones.

Agreed with above, analysis of the pronunciation of much longer phrases does not seem to work so well yet.