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Google translate audio upgrade!

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ibraheem
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United States
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Studies: German, Russian, Mandarin

 
 Message 1 of 8
29 December 2010 at 8:25pm | IP Logged 
Google translate has clearly upgraded their audio for many languages and I am already finding it useful ex. helps me practice Mandarin tones and pronunciation.

The audio feature is available for many languages, just press the listen button. However the audio quality has been horrible for most languages on the site, but I can say they have made a huge improvement for many including: Chinese, Japanese, Swedish, Russian, Norwegian, Finnish, Arabic, and others...

http://translate.google.com/

Edited by ibraheem on 29 December 2010 at 11:04pm

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simonov
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Portugal
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 Message 2 of 8
30 December 2010 at 12:55pm | IP Logged 
This sounds great, but where is that "Listen" button? I must be missing some kind of plug-in, because I've tried Firefox, Opera and IE and nowhere do I see such a practical button.
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ibraheem
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 Message 3 of 8
30 December 2010 at 1:37pm | IP Logged 
simonov wrote:
This sounds great, but where is that "Listen" button? I must be missing some kind of plug-in, because I've tried Firefox, Opera and IE and nowhere do I see such a practical button.


You can type text to be translated, and the listen button should be below the translation. Be sure not to include too much text or the audio will not be available.
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tommus
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 Message 4 of 8
30 December 2010 at 3:23pm | IP Logged 
ibraheem wrote:
Google translate has clearly upgraded their audio

Thanks for that info. Indeed, GT Dutch audio is much improved, and is very good. I have Acapela 'Max" text-to-speech software which I think is currently the best Dutch TTS available. The GT Dutch audio is better than 'Max'.

You need to do about one sentence at a time for the audio to be available. To get authentic text, set GT to the same language (in this case: from: Dutch to: Dutch). Then paste in a sentence in the target language (Dutch). It will 'translate' it exactly, and then speak it. Use Audacity in voice-actuated mode to record the series of sentences. Goes quite quickly. Hopefully GT will increase the size of the audio chunks. They should start a new 'Google Speak' where you can do a page at a time. Again, the audio is very good.



Edited by tommus on 30 December 2010 at 3:24pm

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simonov
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 Message 5 of 8
30 December 2010 at 4:51pm | IP Logged 
Thanks for your explanation, the both of you. I did try a text that was a little too long I suppose.
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tommus
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Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish

 
 Message 6 of 8
30 December 2010 at 5:55pm | IP Logged 
Another Dutch text-to-speech resource that has greatly improved recently is "lees voor" which is a button that some web sites put on some of their pages. It reads that article. Here is an example:

http://www.telegraaf.nl/binnenland/8622096/__Paleis_Soestdij k_sluit_poorten__.html?p=3,1

The technology is from ReadSpeaker which is available in a number of languages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readspeaker
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Hashimi
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Oman
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 Message 7 of 8
31 December 2010 at 7:25pm | IP Logged 

Speaking of text-to-speech, isn't there any good Indonesian/Malay TTS other than that IndoTTS by Akhmad Arman?

I suppose that Indonesian is an easy language in terms of phonetics and phonology.


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Iversen
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berejst.dk
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 Message 8 of 8
09 December 2011 at 11:51am | IP Logged 
In the help system at Google Translate several users have complained that they lost their voice icons around november 19. The strange thing is that they haven't got any answer from Google, - but it does seem that the length of the original text still is the criterion that decides whether the icon is shown, and I can't see that anything about that has changed in november. It puzzles me why the Google team keeps this simple criterion a virtual secret.

Apart from that: the voice in Danish now sounds OK as such (it was very tinny when I listened last time), but you can still hear some weird sounds where the snippets of sound are stitched together. And now I also see a button at the 'depart' language - which is good when you want to listen to some text you have found yourself and not just the translation.

Edited by Iversen on 09 December 2011 at 1:43pm



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