Show HN: How we built a TTS-powered tool for learning spelling/foreign languages

http://quizlet.com/blog/the-making-of-speller/

by philfreo • 15 years ago

71 18 15 years ago

quizlet.com

rryan• 15 years ago

Interesting writeup. The lessons learned section could apply to any startup.

philfreo4• 15 years ago

@asuth and I built "Speller" -- would love to hear any feedback on it. You can try it out here:

http://quizlet.com/2139265/speller/

rorrr• 15 years ago

It's pretty awesome. I'm going through the italian verbs, it's very useful. Where did you get the audio files?

EDIT:

I noticed some audio files sometimes take up to a minute to load (most play instantly though). Chrome/Win7 here.

EDIT2:

It would help if there were an option to play both Italian and English audio, just to use the auditory memory.

philfreo4• 15 years ago

Cool! The audio is text-to-speech, we licensed software from a couple different companies and combined/customized it. We tried to make it fast / preload a lot / are using a CDN (details about that in the post), hopefully the slowness isn't typical.

ziyadb2• 15 years ago

I've spent about 20 minutes on it. Finished the Spanish questions and am now on my second run. Loving it! Great concept, even better implementation. Here are my thoughts:

1. The photos of the objects could be better, I would suggest designing them against a white background to maintain consistency and type, as some are drawn while others are photographs.

2. I have failed to locate a button to stop the "Keep Going" automatic count down. While its persistence makes me return to it even after switching tabs, some people may find that annoying. I would suggest A/B testing with no automatic countdown and with a "stop" button.

PS: The images of "El pez" and "la catarina" are broken :(

philfreo4• 15 years ago

Glad you like it! The images (and text) are user-generated - either uploaded or pulled in from Flickr. We've got 6 million sets and many have better images. Some interesting ones are here: http://quizlet.com/find-flashcards/ and you can do a search for anything and choose "sets with images" as a filter, or make your own.

asuth2• 15 years ago

More examples:

Swedish numbers: http://quizlet.com/3614707/speller/

German clothing: http://quizlet.com/1692182/speller/

French animals: http://quizlet.com/1060977/speller/

Japanese adjectives (good luck!): http://quizlet.com/343188/speller/

wccrawford• 15 years ago

Tried the Japanese one... Can I suggest you stick to the hiragana and katakana syllabaries? You've thrown a couple kanji in there and it's confusing for some of them because you want the kanji form, but others you want straight hiragana... With no rhyme or reason for it.

I also just tried a French one (not the one you linked) and the hints to the side were less than helpful. I guess that's to be expected from a user-generated list. I think I'm also not used to listening to French, and that didn't help... Couldn't really hear what was being said. Again, that could just be my ears, though.

All-in-all, I think it'll be great learning tool... But I thought I'd bring the above to your attention.

chromedude• 15 years ago

Very cool to see what happened behind the scenes and what went into all the iterations!

cosgroveb• 15 years ago

Just wanted to say that my girlfriend is a third grade teacher and she loves quizlet...

fuzzythinker• 15 years ago

I don't think I've ever seen so much links to useful tools on a blog post before. Thanks!

Edit: The http://css-tricks.com/7323-box-sizing/ seems like it will come in handy.

nicpottier• 15 years ago

Very cool, I did something similar when trying to learn Kinyarwanda. (only works on Chrome, click on the lessons to deactivate them) http://kinya.nyaruka.com

Surprisingly similar in a lot of ways, though obviously you guys took it a lot farther. (mine was a few hours thrown in after work to help me study)

The TTS is amazingly good. One suggestion would be to easily allow the repetition of a word. At least in Kinyarwanda the pronunciation is so critical that being able to easily repeat the word really helped. Perhaps the TTS isn't quite good enough for that though.

But really nice, great work.

loevborg• 15 years ago

A comment about "speller". All in all, I like it, especially the clean optics along with nice animations.

1. Looking at the site from Germany, I automatically get German translations. In German, the tool "speller" is called "Buchstabierer". That seems like an overly literal translation. Not that I can come up with a better word, but it strikes me as an unprofessional-sounding choice.

As an aside, this seems to me to be a rather common problem. Many web sites (I imagine) hand a word list to a translator, who then produces the best translations he can find. But if he isn't involved in developing the software, he can't suggest changes to the software that might be necessary to adapt it to another language. I guess my point is that proper internationalization involves more than just a quick translation of a few words. Often I would prefer to be presented with the English version by default, with the choice of opting for my native language.

2. The animation that suggests a different spelling is nice. If I enter "comminciare" when asked for the Italian verb for "to begin", it strikes out the second "m", which makes sense. But not so much if a smaller part of the word was correct. Even if only one or two letters were right -- perhaps I enter "andare" instead of "camminare" -- it ought to strike through the whole thing, instead of falsely suggesting to me that I almost had the right answer.

philfreo4• 15 years ago

Most websites (including Quizlet) don't change what language they show based on your country, but rather based on what your browser settings are - so if you really prefer English usually, you can change that. (We also have a footer dropdown to change the language).

Let me know if you think of a better word for "Speller" in German.

Show HN: How we built a TTS-powered tool for learning spelling/foreign languages

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