Dear Sirs:
I am engaged in creating a Virtual School for a company in China. We will teach academic and verbal English in an all new fashion. What I would like to do is add a “button” to my school web site which will connect with software showing a “meter” that will play a human recorded word of phrase [from a computer library collection] and show up on the meter as some sort of graph type line… then the student repeats the word or phrase with their LIVE pronunciation showing up on the same meter… when the two lines are superimposed exactly on each other, the student has pronounced the word or phrase correctly and moves on to the next… Does this make any sense? Sort of like BYKI Deluxe software from Transparent
My questions:
Can you write this type of software?
Can you license use to use it in our platform?
Typical American question: How much $$$?
IF you don’t or can’t can you point me in the right direction
Thanks for your time and help
Alan B. Cranford, Program Director
---- Address Removed by Elf----
I removed your address because we are a spam magnet and your account would quickly go underwater.
You can check back periodically and see if there are any respondents. The first few times an elf has to vouch for you, but after that, you become a full member and can post whenever you wish.
The developer/programmers don’t as a rule populate the forum, but we may be able to point you in a direction.
Koz
ANY HELP YOU OR YOUR GROUP CAN GIVE WOULD BE GREATLY APPRECIATED… I AM AN ENGLISH TEACHER… NOT A COMPUTER EXPERT… NO NEXT TO NOTHING ABOUT SOUND AND ITS QUALITIES… SO ALL THE HELP I CAN GET WOULD BE GREAT!
ALAN
PS: THANKS FOR REMOVING THE EMAIL ADDRESS
PLEASE DON’T SHOUT!
Nobody can design software like that. Voices do not cancel even if they’re saying the same words in exactly the same way. The same words by the same presenter on the same day will not cancel or match. To extend that, the student will be capturing their voice in a very noisy room with a $0.39 microphone and we assume the presenter will be doing a lot better. The difficulties go into outer space.
We know all about the $0.39 microphone because we also get requests for the “Announcer Filter” to “Clean Up My Voice.”
The best you can do is record the student voice and play it back to their headphones against the presenter. I believe I actually have software on a language learning CD that tries to do that. As luck would have it, Audacity has those tools built-in. The Overdubbing and Sound-On-Sound techniques allow you to hear the presenter on one track while you’re recording your student voice on a new track. Then you can play them against each other. This is the software that allows you to build an orchestra one instrument at a time.
But Audacity has no internet XML/HTML4/5/CSS interface. You and Audacity have to be in the same room and be able to touch the computer. That and there is no server version of Audacity (that I know of).
Yes, it’s possible to write something like that (assuming I haven’t dissuaded you yet), but there’s no shortage of people volunteering programmer/developers to write something. You write us a nice, say, half-inch thick best selling English novel and we’ll start programming. We’ll be done about the same time. By the way, if you make any English, punctuation, spelling or grammar errors anywhere in the novel, nobody will be able to read it – I mean nobody will be able to get past page one. That’s how programming works. It’s not a whip-it-out kind of thing.
There are people all over earth volunteering the Audacity Developers to change the program. There are whole dense web sites devoted to errors and changes – and our people aren’t even trying to program Audacity to run across time zones. We consider ourselves very fortunate if we can keep all of our users’ laptops from exploding.
I don’t know of any third party programmers (Other than the ones at work. We crack the door periodically and throw them raw meat), but other elves may know a way to get this done – remembering from the above description that it can’t be done.
Koz
BYKI Deluxe has such a voice comparison meter… i am seeking someone who can write an original program to do the same thing. IF you can’t do it… you can just say so… and I will seek some place else… no problem… but I was told theis was one of THE sites for sound experts… sorry
Write back if you find a way to do it. Have you contacted The Travel Linguist?
Koz
Also remember that “look and feel” of software products can put you in court. Getting The Travel Linguist to do it is far and away the best way out – if they agree to it. Koz
We get asked this at least once a week. Audacity would need large changes and security improvements to run on web servers or be called from web pages.
That’s not exactly what the Byki help says. For waveforms it says that you need to match the same general pattern of pitch and loudness. Then there are Pitch, Vowel and Fricative graphs too where the aim is to match certain characteristics. Does Byki support laying one waveform over another?
Audacity already has waveform, spectrogram and spectrum views. One of the Audacity developers is interested in language learning so would I expect have some interest in word graphics and enhanced waveform comparison as an Audacity feature (for example, superimposed waveforms). The stumbling block is probably your requirement for this to be a web application. Even if you accepted a program that could just run on the user’s computer, you would still have to pay the developer at commercial programming rates and be prepared for the program to be open source (meaning that others could copy it or sell it).
And we would have to be careful not to tread on Byki’s work which is copyrighted with a proprietary licence. And as Byki appear to already have web based software for their online teaching, you would have to be careful not to tread on that too if you found someone to develop a web app.
Gale