This website seems almost dangerously wrong. It uses only a single phoneme / sound for single letters, regardless of the actual phoneme used in the word. For example, every 'a' in a word is the /æ/ phoneme (as in "cat"), but this same sound is used for the word "a", which should be pronounced as /ə/ or /eɪ/ (as in "about" or "cake").
It also seems to mix up American and British English pronunciation between the phoneme and word forms a lot, for example in the word "class" which uses American phonemes but uses the British word pronunciation.
It sometimes cheats by declaring a word 'difficult'. For example word "no" is declared difficult, which the average learner is probably pretty practiced in saying. It's just not using the same phoneme as the all the other 'o' phonemes on the website.
I'm sure its made with best intentions, but the foundation on which the app is built / prompted is incorrect. Please don't use this to teach children. Use proper material made by educators, acclaimed authors and experts.
Alez007 4 hours ago [-]
Agreed, I was excited about the prospect of this but it seems rushed. It's got potential but I wouldn't show it to my child in this state.
A language selector would be useful there as it's confusing for me (living in UK).
zoozla 7 hours ago [-]
Thanks for pointing these things out, although dangerous is probably overstating it a bit. The points you mentioned at are easily fixable - there are few missing phonemes that I haven't recorded, the voice can be changed from British (it's actually Australian) to US in the settings, and the word no is often taught as a sight word because it comes much earlier than the full "o" sound, but you can tweak which words are treated as "tricky" in the settings as well.
swerve3815 16 hours ago [-]
Neat project. Too bad it only handles English phonemes, as it would be very valuable for teaching other languages. Maybe someday I'll convert it from ARPABET to IPA...
zoozla 7 hours ago [-]
That's one of the reasons I made it open source - you can point your agent to it and adapt it to any other language. You'll need to record the phonemes yourself through, haven't found any AI model that can do it well.
whitten 13 hours ago [-]
I was thinking this too.
Especially if it handles UNICODE character sets.
giancarlostoro 15 hours ago [-]
Looks nice, on my iPhone (and maybe my iPad too?) I don't hear a voice at all.
zoozla 7 hours ago [-]
Oh that's odd. We use it both on Android and an iPad. Will look into it, thanks!
Jerry Pournelle often mentioned having an application which would teach reading --- apparently it is now out of print?
https://www.readingtlc.com/
Have you looked at intermediary things such as the "Living Books"?
https://wanderfulstorybooks.com/
It also seems to mix up American and British English pronunciation between the phoneme and word forms a lot, for example in the word "class" which uses American phonemes but uses the British word pronunciation.
It sometimes cheats by declaring a word 'difficult'. For example word "no" is declared difficult, which the average learner is probably pretty practiced in saying. It's just not using the same phoneme as the all the other 'o' phonemes on the website.
I'm sure its made with best intentions, but the foundation on which the app is built / prompted is incorrect. Please don't use this to teach children. Use proper material made by educators, acclaimed authors and experts.
A language selector would be useful there as it's confusing for me (living in UK).