Today's Toronto Star has an article about a site called Speak2me.cn that uses voice recognition software to help students practice their speaking skills. It's the first free online site I've seen doing this, but it surely won't be the last. In an interesting move, they use product placement in their dialogues as a source of income.
I wanted to try it out, but you really need to be able to read Chinese to use it. If anybody has more success than me, please, let me know what you think.
2 comments:
hah! I read Chinese fluently and will have to play with this when I am out of work.
The registration form for the account is on the main banner:
您的Email： Your e-mail address.
英文名：English name
中文名：Chinese name:
性别：Sex 男 M 女 F
设置密码：password
学习目标：education level
The next step asks you to import your friends from MSN (popular messaging client, almost as much so as the China-based QQ). You can skip this by clicking the 跳过 >> (skip) at the top.
It will then tell you that you're registered but need to check your e-mail to activate your account.
After clicking the activation link, you're asked to add a profile image (跳过 >> skip) and then you're brought to a system that's obviously cribbed a good deal from Facebook. Apparently the site's plugins do not support Chrome, so I could not go further.
Yeah, I got about that far too.
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