I don’t get it, I don’t hear anything. Am I supposed to hear something?
Edit Okay, there are Flash “Listen” buttons you can’t see if you don’t have Flash installed.
And yet, even in a browser with Flash, I hear nothing. All I see is a button that turns light blue and dark blue. Which is “play”? This is why I always rant about piss-poor UX from Google.
It isn't just you. I don't hear anything, either. [EDIT: Fixed; see below.]
Also, I agree on the poor UI design.
But in any case, assuming this works, which it apparently does, for some, it's a cute idea.
EDIT: Got it working. Are you running Flashblock? I am, and after I put translate.google.com into FB's whitelist, I get audio. When the button is light blue, press it. The button turns dark blue, and the sound plays. When the sound is finished, the button goes back to light blue.
Thanks for explaining this. I don't have Flash and was very confused why nonsense words being translated to the same nonsense words was of interest to anyone...
Just went through the OS X speech synth voices and I recognized some being used in quite a few electronic music productions, for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK2NG28vKNw
Marilyn Manson used the voice on certain tracks on Antichrist Superstar.
According to Wikipedia:
The song "Man That You Fear" by Marilyn Manson ends with the MacInTalk voices repeating, "When all of your wishes are granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed". Also, during live performances of "Antichrist Superstar", the MacInTalk voices repeat "You might as well kill yourself - you're already dead" at the end of the song.
Because they train it with EU documents, which are required by law to be translated into all the languages of the member countries. Since the documents are made available for public use, machine translation between European languages has become significantly better in recent years because the EU documents are being used to train the software.
Not really. At least not on a naive level. None of "pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk" occurs in any German word.
Okay, compound nouns are probably not what you had in mind when you made your statement. But then again, your statement was pretty general.
Regarding Fatzke: "zk" is not in one syllable either. At least not when I (or google) pronounce it. :)
The standard example is supreme court vs Bundesverfassungsgericht. The chief difference is in spelling.
I had a phase, where my German looked much more English---I put spaced inside compound words and did not capitalize all nouns. I should try capitalizing all Nouns in English one Day.
It also works in Italian and Spanish, and sorta works in French -- I'm sure it has to do with the phonemes in each language and how the languages are implemented in the text-to-speech algorithm.
Someone build a little web app that lets you press symbols that represent each instrument, and build beats that you can loop.The google site stops letting you use the "Listen" button after a certain number of characters.
Would it be practical to make remote calls to the listen function? Usage: if I want to have a webpage read speech automatically to the user after a javascript event, without showing the google page. I expect the first step would be loading the page in a hidden iframe.
That actually is fairly similar to a webapp I built in 30 minutes a few months ago. I had the idea to build a webform that lets you type in some text, and the computer reads it back.
If you are using OS X, you should be able to use the `say` command to create a recording of a voice speaking a sentence. You could likely take that, pipe it into a file and serve it up in an <audio> tag and play it from javascript that way.
I might try hacking my project to do exactly that. However, I think a sane solution for you would be to make use of system accessibility options or screen readers. The downside there is that you can't call into those from a user's browser.
I don't think there is a chance in hell that google would ever consider augmenting its url structure on behalf of or to play nice with a shortening service.
Using a text-to-speech engine as a musical instrument is so on-topic in my book!
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Beatboxing seems to be a very geeky scene. Not that I know much about it, but look at the biggest names in beatboxing - most of them would blend in no problem in any CS department. Looks don't mean much, but still, on interviews these guys give off the same vibe.
I think that this submission does not belong to the HN. It carries little educational value and I wouldn't call it deeply interesting (as described in ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html ). There isn't any effort to explain the beatbox effect. Also there are many voice synthesizers, google's is just the easiest accessible one. This is why the link seems to me just like a funny picture of a cat and I am deeply alarmed. (sorry for bad english, non-native here)
The defining characteristic of hacker culture is the awe of beautiful code. When the unforeseen side effects from feeding a program with edge case input are as deeply gratifying as these, it instills a sense of beauty and awe of the underlying code.
As is shown by the number of upvotes, people don't come to HN to educate themselves. They come here to be awed. Education is a side effect.
I find it funny and amazing, though. I like HN for its diversity. Every time, I find something new, but I also want it to be different. I'm just starting my day (morning here) and this post made laugh and in good humor.
There are other sites more suited for this task: reddit.com , reddit.com/r/programming , digg.com and others. As stated in http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html , "The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly interesting"
