Is Cantonese Audio Version Planned?

[jacky89]

I've been searching for a dictionary for the iphone that supports both mandarin and cantonese audio but couldn't find any. Is Cantonese audio planned? If so, when is the expected release date?

For your information, there is a great Cantonese voice available for Windows that you can probably incorporate into Pleco. On my windows XP 7" Samsung tablet, I use a dictionary software called Lingoes and I downloaded the Scansoft Sin-Ji Full 22khz (TTS) cantonese voice to use along with Lingoes. It's great, I can input chinese by writing anywhere on the screen (using NJStar), and Lingoes will speak the word in cantonese (or mandarin if I choose) and define the character in english. Too bad the 7" windows tablet is too clunky and slow. It would be great to have similar capabilities on the Iphone.

 

[mikelove]

I've been searching for a dictionary for the iphone that supports both mandarin and cantonese audio but couldn't find any. Is Cantonese audio planned? If so, when is the expected release date?

We do plan to add Cantonese audio once we license a Cantonese dictionary, but we still haven't even finished negotiating / signing that dictionary license yet, and we can't get started on the voice until we've got the dictionary locked up. Since voices like that Scansoft one are copyrighted, though, we'd either have to license one of those too or record our own audio. So we'll probably just record our own audio like we did for Mandarin - that can take quite a while, though, particularly if we follow our Mandarin approach of recording words and not just syllables (actually probably a bit more important for Cantonese, since the finer points of tones / tone transitions / etc can be tricky), so it's tough to even speculate on a release date - certainly not until 2011, anyway.

 

[diligence]

Hey jacky89, could you tell me more about the Lingoes program and the Cantonese setup you have? I've always wanted to have some sort of Cantonese dictionary and pronunciation program. This could be it..

 

[dustpuppy]

I'm also extremely interested in a cantonese audio dictionary.

 

[jacky89]

Just go download Lingoes. I think the newest version is 2.7.1 and is freeware. Then you need to buy and install the Scansoft Sin-ji cantonese voice. You can choose the cantonese voice in Lingoes. There are a ton of options in Lingoes such as speech options, font size/type, etc.. There are a couple hundred free dictionaries you can download for Lingoes. It is the best Cantonese dictionary software solution on the market. There is another cantonese dictionary software called ProLingo but I never used it. I like Lingoes alot, especially if you are using it on a tablet PC, where you can use NJstar handwriting recognition software. Lingoes can also read an entire paragraph that you copy and paste into the software and the cantonese speech accuracy is very good. You can even integrate Lingoes with cursor speech ability in Firefox and Internet Explorer. Give it a try.

 

[dustpuppy]

Which chinese dictionary did you install in Lingoes ?
Also, is there a cantonese dictionary that gives you a jyutping transcription ?

Thanks.

 

[miceblue]

I'm also very interested in the audio support for the iPhone app (I'm trying to learn Cantonese). I'm glad to hear it's a work-in-progress!

 

[dustpuppy]

Mike, there is a web service called iSpeech which offers a cantonese voice, and they have iPhone and Android APIs. This would be a great addition to the document reader. I believe you have to be online to use it. As a cantonese learner, i can often use the OCR to decipher some characters, but getting the pronounciation accurate is very difficult, this would solve that problem.

What are your thoughts on implementing this ? it could be a paid add-on.

 

[mikelove]

Mike, there is a web service called iSpeech which offers a cantonese voice, and they have iPhone and Android APIs. This would be a great addition to the document reader. I believe you have to be online to use it. As a cantonese learner, i can often use the OCR to decipher some characters, but getting the pronounciation accurate is very difficult, this would solve that problem.

What are your thoughts on implementing this ? it could be a paid add-on.

We prefer to do this stuff offline - we've already licensed an offline text-to-speech engine for Mandarin. Too many of our users have poor / expensive internet connectivity for us to introduce a paid add-on that required an internet connection.

Cantonese audio would probably only be interesting if we had an actual Cantonese dictionary; we're working very hard to try to get one but we don't have one yet. We can explore licensing a Cantonese audio system once we do get one, though.