Pleco Desktop
- Thread starter james
- Start date
Fleminator
举人
I'm super keen on a Desktop version...frankly, I LOVE having my flashcards with me all the time, but I find myself sitting at my desk in front of my nice big laptop, staring at my tiny handheld. I'd much rather use a desktop if I'm near my computer (that is, if flash cards are sync easily)
I would also imagine it would further simplify exports to my palm. I would definitely get it if it is offered at kind of an "upgrade" price to the palm version. I have friends who hate using palms who would probably go for a desktop version at full price, but current palm users would just see it as an add-on.
also, I read something, somewhere about integrating some web browsing functions...that would be great
ALSO: I understand it is a long way off, but as soon as Pleco 2.0 is up and running, and the PC Desktop version is finished, I would hope that a Mac version of the desktop program is in line for development
I would also imagine it would further simplify exports to my palm. I would definitely get it if it is offered at kind of an "upgrade" price to the palm version. I have friends who hate using palms who would probably go for a desktop version at full price, but current palm users would just see it as an add-on.
also, I read something, somewhere about integrating some web browsing functions...that would be great
ALSO: I understand it is a long way off, but as soon as Pleco 2.0 is up and running, and the PC Desktop version is finished, I would hope that a Mac version of the desktop program is in line for development
Actually, one thing that would serously interest me would be if it was possible to test your own pronounciation. This isn't something you can do on a PDA I imagine, at least, not easily. By that, I mean being able to speak into a microphone, and have the program analyze and try to turn what you said into a pinyin syllable (or, even better, whole words and sentances).
It would also be nice if it could have an integrated browser, say, or other such things that just can't be done on a handheld.
Would you be able to give away a 'lite' version which is only good for synching flashcards for free, assuming people have bought the PDA version? I'm sure everyone would appreciate that
It would also be nice if it could have an integrated browser, say, or other such things that just can't be done on a handheld.
Would you be able to give away a 'lite' version which is only good for synching flashcards for free, assuming people have bought the PDA version? I'm sure everyone would appreciate that
There would almost certainly be some sort of discount on the desktop version for PDA-version users, yes; it just makes intuitive sense, really, the product is less valuable to someone who already owns Pleco on a handheld than it is to someone who doesn't own any version of our software. Integrated web browsing is one of the key features we think this would add over the PDA version, and we've got some very cool ideas of things we can do with vocabulary on web pages. And of course management of / export to your PDA flashcards would be a key feature too.
A Mac version is a definite possibility, though between the ease of running Linux apps in X11 on Mac, the growing popularity of Linux on desktops, and Apple's generally-horrible attitude towards developers as so recently demonstrated with the iPhone firmware fiasco, I'm starting to think that we might be better off supporting Linux first. Ultimately it's a business decision, though, and since Mac remains popular in schools and it's unlikely Apple's going to make OS X development web-only anytime soon it probably does make sense to do a dedicated Mac version assuming the Windows one is at all successful, however personally annoyed I may be with the way they're handling the iPhone.
Pronunciation testing would be tricky, we'd probably have to license a lot of the technology since it's beyond what we can develop ourselves, though certainly something basic which tested you on your tones by measuring pitch changes might be within our abilities. But yes, in general we'd be trying to add a lot of features that aren't possible on handhelds. A free version for flashcard management also makes sense, though since we probably wouldn't be able to include any licensed content in that free version you'd be limited to either finding words in a free dictionary like Adso/CEDICT or entering them manually.
A Mac version is a definite possibility, though between the ease of running Linux apps in X11 on Mac, the growing popularity of Linux on desktops, and Apple's generally-horrible attitude towards developers as so recently demonstrated with the iPhone firmware fiasco, I'm starting to think that we might be better off supporting Linux first. Ultimately it's a business decision, though, and since Mac remains popular in schools and it's unlikely Apple's going to make OS X development web-only anytime soon it probably does make sense to do a dedicated Mac version assuming the Windows one is at all successful, however personally annoyed I may be with the way they're handling the iPhone.
Pronunciation testing would be tricky, we'd probably have to license a lot of the technology since it's beyond what we can develop ourselves, though certainly something basic which tested you on your tones by measuring pitch changes might be within our abilities. But yes, in general we'd be trying to add a lot of features that aren't possible on handhelds. A free version for flashcard management also makes sense, though since we probably wouldn't be able to include any licensed content in that free version you'd be limited to either finding words in a free dictionary like Adso/CEDICT or entering them manually.
Fleminator
举人
my first thought on the speech recognition thing was "yeah, right" because I've used Rosetta Stone's speech recognition and it was pretty terrible (even when local speakers were trying to speak)...so it may be to large an undertaking.
Then I thought, "Well, I was pretty disappointed with character recognition software based on my experience with Wenlin, but Pleco totally out did them in that department, so maybe they could develop speech recognition to that level, or adopt some third party program that actually works for Chinese dictation." It would be fun, but I don't know about the cost/benefit ratio there.
Then I thought, "Well, I was pretty disappointed with character recognition software based on my experience with Wenlin, but Pleco totally out did them in that department, so maybe they could develop speech recognition to that level, or adopt some third party program that actually works for Chinese dictation." It would be fun, but I don't know about the cost/benefit ratio there.
Here are at least couple of choices for speech testing:
http://www.chinese-forums.com/showthrea ... ecognition
Praat
http://www.chinese-forums.com/showthrea ... ecognition
iFLYTEK
Cost/benefit is the key, yes; the way we provided a better handwriting recognizer than others had had was by spending a lot of money to license the most popular one in China rather than trying to cobble together something on our own, and likewise with speech recognition, for anything other than the very simple sort of recognizer that Rosetta has we'd have to go out and license someone's Chinese speech recognition system at what would no doubt be a very hefty expense. Which means this probably isn't something you'd see in the first desktop version, but a few more years of steady sales growth and there won't really be anything that's too expensive for us to license if a significant percentage of our customers are likely to find it useful.
Praat is an interesting idea for an open-source project but it doesn't seem like it's capable of doing much more than measuring pitch, which wouldn't be all that difficult for us to cobble together ourselves; I don't think that alone would actually do much for people's pronunciation abilities, though. What you really need is something that can go into more detail, identify vowel errors (sharng versus shayng, chu/qu confusion) and the like along with mixed-up tones; with good enough technology this could really be a killer app, showing you a page of text, asking you to read it aloud and correcting you both when you mis-pronounced a character and when you had the wrong syllable altogether for one. And of course it would enable some insanely cool things with flashcards, instead of tediously typing in the pronunciation for a word you could just say it and the software would score your response entirely based on that.
Praat is an interesting idea for an open-source project but it doesn't seem like it's capable of doing much more than measuring pitch, which wouldn't be all that difficult for us to cobble together ourselves; I don't think that alone would actually do much for people's pronunciation abilities, though. What you really need is something that can go into more detail, identify vowel errors (sharng versus shayng, chu/qu confusion) and the like along with mixed-up tones; with good enough technology this could really be a killer app, showing you a page of text, asking you to read it aloud and correcting you both when you mis-pronounced a character and when you had the wrong syllable altogether for one. And of course it would enable some insanely cool things with flashcards, instead of tediously typing in the pronunciation for a word you could just say it and the software would score your response entirely based on that.
NI HAO!
I KNOW YOU KNOW JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT IS GOING ON AND I AM HESITANT TO EVEN TELL YOU THIS, AS IT'S PROBABLY NOT IN THE REALM OF WHAT YOU ARE THINKING ABOUT IN SPEECH RECOGNITION, BUT "I THINK" A COMPANY CALLED NEW CONCEPTS HAS A TYPE OF SPEECH RECOGNITION THAT IF YOU DON'T KNOW ABOUT IT, YOU COULD SEE IF IT IS OF ANY INTEREST OR VALUE.
YOUR COMMENT ABOUT BEING ABLE TO PRONOUNCE THE CHARACTER IN THE FLASHCARDS, IS ALMOST UNBELIEVABLE AS A POSSIBILITY.
I WILL DO MY BEST TO PROMOTE YOUR PRODUCT(S) SO YOU WILL HAVE THE NECESSARY FUNDS TO CONTINUE DEVELOPING MORE AND MORE FEATURES.
ALL THE BEST,
马来利
MA LAI LI
P.S. BU HAO YI SI WO WANG LE GEI NI ZHE GE. http://www.newconceptmandarin.com
I KNOW YOU KNOW JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT IS GOING ON AND I AM HESITANT TO EVEN TELL YOU THIS, AS IT'S PROBABLY NOT IN THE REALM OF WHAT YOU ARE THINKING ABOUT IN SPEECH RECOGNITION, BUT "I THINK" A COMPANY CALLED NEW CONCEPTS HAS A TYPE OF SPEECH RECOGNITION THAT IF YOU DON'T KNOW ABOUT IT, YOU COULD SEE IF IT IS OF ANY INTEREST OR VALUE.
YOUR COMMENT ABOUT BEING ABLE TO PRONOUNCE THE CHARACTER IN THE FLASHCARDS, IS ALMOST UNBELIEVABLE AS A POSSIBILITY.
I WILL DO MY BEST TO PROMOTE YOUR PRODUCT(S) SO YOU WILL HAVE THE NECESSARY FUNDS TO CONTINUE DEVELOPING MORE AND MORE FEATURES.
ALL THE BEST,
马来利
MA LAI LI
P.S. BU HAO YI SI WO WANG LE GEI NI ZHE GE. http://www.newconceptmandarin.com
I haven't used Praat, but Carlo on chinese-forums apparently has found a way to make good use of it.
See this comparison he did of Dashan with a native speaker:
http://www.chinese-forums.com/showthrea ... post103836
Another post by carlo on speech software:
http://www.chinese-forums.com/showthread.php?t=3366
Playing with sound
Interesting, but still seems to be largely human-assisted; it's a long way from having the AI to identify the magnitude and nature of differences in pronunciation. So still a lot of R&D work needed to turn this into a usable product. Certainly worth keeping an eye on, though.
We'll look into this New Concepts, though I never tend to get too interested in startups with big bold claims until they have an actual product I can actually try out in actual non-stage-managed demo conditions.
We'll look into this New Concepts, though I never tend to get too interested in startups with big bold claims until they have an actual product I can actually try out in actual non-stage-managed demo conditions.
I BELIEVE IT IS NEW CONCEPT"S SOFTWARE I USED AND WHAT IT DID WAS PLAY A WORD, MAYBE EVEN A PHRASE AN DISPLAYED A VISUALIZATION OF THE SOUND AND THEN THE USER WOULD REPEAT IT AND IT WOULD SHOW THE USER'S SOUND VISUALIZATION. BOTH VISUALIZATIONS WERE DISPLAYED, SO YOU COULD THE SIMILARITIES, AND IN MY CASE, THE DIFFERENCES. IT WAS HELPFUL AND FRUSTRATING AT THE SAME TIME, i.e. I COULDN'T PRONOUNCE MUCH OF ANYTHING CORRECTLY.
BACK THEN THEY HAD A FREE TRIAL DEMO.
BACK THEN THEY HAD A FREE TRIAL DEMO.
(sorry for the slow response on this)
Still planned, no idea about the timeframe though - depending on how smoothly the 2.0 launch goes we may be launching our quick-and-dirty "preview" version a short time after that (essentially just the WM version recompiled to run on desktops, without any added features and probably even confined to a smallish window), but the real desktop version lost its place in line to the iPhone and hence has to wait until that version's done before we can start work on it.
Still planned, no idea about the timeframe though - depending on how smoothly the 2.0 launch goes we may be launching our quick-and-dirty "preview" version a short time after that (essentially just the WM version recompiled to run on desktops, without any added features and probably even confined to a smallish window), but the real desktop version lost its place in line to the iPhone and hence has to wait until that version's done before we can start work on it.
Not quite as ASAP as we'd like, unfortunately, but still in the works - it's just tough to spend any time on a desktop version when we've got several e-mails a day coming in about iPhone. (personally I find the idea of a desktop port much more intriguing from a design perspective, but the market wants what it wants)
It's a bigger market, but it's a market that we don't currently have a presence in. Whereas we're already in the mobile software market but currently only support two platforms with rapidly-dwindling market share - we need to branch out to another mobile platform just to keep our sales from shrinking.
Also, there's already lots of good Chinese dictionary software for desktops - Wenlin, of course, along with a number of interesting free titles like ZDT. Not to mention the many excellent Chinese dictionary websites that have sprung up offering much of the same functionality. So it's not a market where we could come in and instantly blow everybody out of the water with a superior product, as we hope to do on iPhone.
Also, there's already lots of good Chinese dictionary software for desktops - Wenlin, of course, along with a number of interesting free titles like ZDT. Not to mention the many excellent Chinese dictionary websites that have sprung up offering much of the same functionality. So it's not a market where we could come in and instantly blow everybody out of the water with a superior product, as we hope to do on iPhone.