Voice Input

[Donald]

I've recently downloaded Pleco app version 3.2.92. Samsung Phone: One UI Version 4.1, Android Version 12. The last security patch was installed on 8/1/23.

I purchased the Pleco Pro Bundle. As a beginning Mandarin learner, my first step is pronunciation mastery. I'm having problems. It will pick a simple word such as bàba, but not shā. It will pick up that simple word 10% of the time, and the other 90% of the time tells me to try again. On the try again, the mic flashes for about 2 seconds. It's a bit frustrating. Is there a challenge with speech recognition in this software? I have no issues using Google Voice Assist on my phone.

I've read through a 2019 thread describing a similar issue which doesn't appear to be resolved. I would appreciate any tips from you all who have overcome this issue.

Thank you.

 

[mikelove]

Unfortunately, this isn't really something we can do much about on our end - all we do is pass along the request to Android and it handles the rest, we have no control over anything that goes on between when we make that request and when the box disappears and we get back the text it collected. Have you tried simply switching to a Chinese language keyboard (like Google's own) and the using the microphone button on that keyboard for voice input? That might work more reliably.

We actually include this feature in our free app - and other features that are highly dependent on Android behaving correctly, like system text-to-speech and Screen Reader - because we don't want anybody to pay for it and discover that it's unusable on a particular Android configuration. But nevertheless, if you'd like a refund for your purchase just contact support and we'll be happy to set that up.

(we'd love to offer our own built-in speech recognizer that works more reliably, but of course it's kind of hard to develop + charge for something like that when for the majority of users, the free one works perfectly well)

 

[Donald]

Thanks for the explanation. Using the mic on the Simplified Chinese keyboard seems to have worked.

Thanks.