Human vs. Computer: can you tell the difference?
Filed Under World Languages, Latin
Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) improved its speech synthesis with a new voice named ALEX. A decisive improvement over KATHY, BRUCE, and FRED, ALEX even recognizes commas and pauses accordingly.
Take Shakespeare’s sonnet, for example:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
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Can you read my comma, thank you.
Can you read my question mark?
Can you read my question, Mark?
Can you read my question mark
Here’s Alex’s interpretation.
[Right click to open in new tab, Safari won’t truncate the file.]
Now add to that, an iFlash deck that Ms. Spaltro compiled from her Latin classes. Here’s a movie of iFlash in action, changing card sides every 4 seconds or so. Only I checked a box in preferences that has ALEX reading words that students hadn’t recorded. See if you can tell the difference between ALEX and the humans (hint: ALEX sort of messes up the Latin pronunciation).
iFlash is a great tool for memorizing anything. The students have fun building these decks. I highly recommend it for nailing those verb conjugations. =)
