Pleco Reader - Pinyin Alphabet - TTS or Speach

[Grisham]

Hello,
I have just bought Pleco Basic and Hui TTS and have just started to learn Chinese.

I understand that in the future that the Pleco Reader will be able to read text aloud without having to select text.

Would it be possible to have a Pinyin alphabet TTS reader that could also read the individual alphabet letters with the correct Chinese pronunciation. For example the letters, finals, initials and combination.

I have tried Hui but you have to first input a Chinese character at the start of the sentence and then she will read the alphabet or pronounce words in English.

This would be helpful as I can write up my lesson in Pinyin and then have my lesson read out with the correct pronunciation for word or letters (and also copy and paste Chinese characters from the dictionary where needed).

 

[mikelove]

Would it be possible to have a Pinyin alphabet TTS reader that could also read the individual alphabet letters with the correct Chinese pronunciation. For example the letters, finals, initials and combination.

I have tried Hui but you have to first input a Chinese character at the start of the sentence and then she will read the alphabet or pronounce words in English.

This would be helpful as I can write up my lesson in Pinyin and then have my lesson read out with the correct pronunciation for word or letters (and also copy and paste Chinese characters from the dictionary where needed).

Certainly possible - the system will let us feed it Pinyin as well as characters - but it won't sound very good, since the large number of homophones in Chinese make it very difficult for it to sort out the correct grammar / spacing in a page full of Pinyin. But it wouldn't be difficult to tap into it anyway, the main question is the interface - we need a) a way to select text that doesn't involve Chinese, and b) a way to indicate that that text should be read as Pinyin.

 

[Grisham]

As snow cancelled my Chinese lesson, I have had time the think.

In terms of selecting I could enter a symbol into my text such as "^" which I could touch as if it was a Chinese, but ignored by the TTS. Then I could use the interface the select the word, phrase or sentence, which could use a mixture English, Pinyin or Chinese characters.

(Would be be possible to to use multi-touch in the Reader to select text? So one finger to touch a single word or phrase, or two fingers, one at the start or end of a sentence or paragraph to select to whole text. This would then speed up to process of selecting text.)

In terms of letting the system know that it is Pinyin and not English I could enter more symbols in my notes. For instance "<" could be used to start a phrase and ">" could be used to end a phrase.

For example: " ^ how are you? <nǐ hǎo ma> 你好吗 " or " ^ how are you? <hi3 hao3 ma> 你好吗 ".

(In fact as well as using TTS the original free man and woman voice could be used to pronounce the words, as they spoke slowly enough for me to follow.)

 

[mikelove]

(Would be be possible to to use multi-touch in the Reader to select text? So one finger to touch a single word or phrase, or two fingers, one at the start or end of a sentence or paragraph to select to whole text. This would then speed up to process of selecting text.)

It's not really possible to reliably point to things with multi-touch, only to make generalized multi-touch gestures in the middle of the screen (zooming, panning, etc), and in general we try to steer clear of relying on gestures like that because they're hard for users to discover / remember and much less reliable to trigger.

In terms of letting the system know that it is Pinyin and not English I could enter more symbols in my notes. For instance "<" could be used to start a phrase and ">" could be used to end a phrase.

Something like that might work, yes. The main other trick would be getting the system to allow tap-selection of text that isn't Chinese.

 

[Grisham]

The general selection for text on Android is to touch and hold the screen, that then automatically selects the word. Then two blue cursors appear to the left and right of the selected text which allow you to select the area of text you want by dragging the cursors.
That would be a system that everyone is familiar on Android and I think is easier than the current text selection system. I think it is built into Android but I am not sure how easy it is to integrate with the Pleco Reader (although from reading another post you are already looking into that.)

 

[mikelove]

The general selection for text on Android is to touch and hold the screen, that then automatically selects the word. Then two blue cursors appear to the left and right of the selected text which allow you to select the area of text you want by dragging the cursors.
That would be a system that everyone is familiar on Android and I think is easier than the current text selection system. I think it is built into Android but I am not sure how easy it is to integrate with the Pleco Reader (although from reading another post you are already looking into that.)

That's what we're planning to support, yes - it is indeed a bit tricky to integrate but we're working on it. But we want to keep the tap-selection option too, since it's significantly easier / faster to invoke and presents less of a mental "barrier."