The 2Lingual developers have incorporated the new browser feature into their multilingual search tools and have now provided us with Google Multilingual Voice Search and Twitter Multilingual Voice Search. Both the tools support 51 Speech-to-Text Languages including various regional variations. For example, for English, there’s American English, British English, Canadian English, Australian English, Indian English and South African English.

Obviously, both tools work only in Google Chrome. In other browsers you simply won’t see the microphone icon to speak. Voice Search requires a Speech-to-Text capable browser like Google Chrome version 11.0.696. You’ll also obviously need a headset and microphone to speak into.

1. Search Google By Voice

• To search, click the tiny microphone icon in the search field and say out loud what you want to search for:

• If the tool couldn’t hear you, you will be offered the option to check your microphone settings:

• If what you said wasn’t clear enough, the tool will suggest other possible phrases you were probably going to search for:

If you don’t select any of the suggested alternative search queries, they will disappear in a few seconds.

• If you want to speak any other language, just select it from the drop-down:

• And keep searching:

The tool works surprisingly fast fetching results almost instantly. It does look like a huge time-saver for multi-lingual search engine users.

2. Search Twitter By Voice

Twitter multilingual voice search is a later addition to the tool that lets you search Twitter by voice. Similarly, just click a microphone icon in the search field and speak your search term:

More tools from the same developer which were previously reviewed on MUO:

• 2Lingual: Google-powered Bilingual Search Engine that makes it easy to search in 2 separate languages and provides a query translation option for your cross-lingual searches. I have included this one into my post listing 3 tools to see and compare search results side by side.
• 2lingual: Bilingual Twitter Search: Another two-language tool for Twitter.

Other Voice Search & Speech Recognition Tools:

• Tazti – Search Web, Play Music & Control Programs using Voice: a desktop speech recognition software;
• VoiceSearch: Adds Voice Search To Google Chrome: a Google Chrome extension that lets you search by voice. The supported sites include Google, Bing, Wikipedia, YouTube, Wolfram Alpha and DuckDuckGo
• Taskos: To-do List App That Responds To Voice Commands: a free smartphone app for Android phones. Through this app you can create new tasks using voice commands.

The tools look both fun and useful and they may come in handy for heavy search users. What do you think of them?

The iPad speech aid software is easy to use and while there are certainly some features that we would love to see added to its small but already strong arsenal of features, it has made an impressive start. Not only can it be used as a speech impediment aid, the app can also prove useful for those who are learning English and can use the app as a pronunciation guide.

On first launching the app, a small guide on how to use it will be displayed. There isn’t much to using the application itself, and there is definitely something to be said for its simplicity and ease of use. There are also several ways in which it can be used.

There are two tabs in the app, one for words and one for phrases. On the words tab, you’ll find a grid of over 50 commonly used words which you can tap to add to the sentence or phrase you wish to hear.

On the phrases tab, you’ll find a grid of 16 commonly used phrases which, like the words, you can tap to speak immediately.

One main gripe with the app so far is the fact that you cannot add or delete words or phrases from the grid, which would really make the app even more useful when it comes to using it as a speech impediment aid. Each person may have personal phrases or words that they use more commonly than others, and personalising the application will make it even more useful.

After you’ve chosen your words, phrase or typed out the sentence yourself, hit the green speak button to hear the phrase. You have a choice between two different voices which you can change in the app’s settings – Dave or Rosie. Of course the robotic voice does leave something to be desired, but is a limitation to be expected with an app like this.

As you’re typing or entering words in the text box, you can clear it by hitting the ‘x’ button and delete one word at a time using the backspace button.

Other settings you can change are choosing between a horizontal and vertical keyboard, with the latter having two options for right and left handed users. The horizontal keyboard does seem like the more comfortable option to use, particularly if you are accustomed to using the iPad’s native keyboard.

You can also import your contacts to the app. The benefit of doing this is to improve the app’s prediction settings. As you are typing, four buttons above the keyboard will feature words that the app predicts you may need next in your sentence, a feature which should improve the more you use the app.

In addition to the regular buttons found on the iPad’s native keyboard, there are three additional buttons. The repeat button allows you to repeat the last phrase or word that was spoken.

When the ‘speak each word’ button is toggled on, any phrases or words that are typed into the app will be automatically spoken without having to hit the ‘Speak’ button first.

The bell button plays a chime sound which can prove useful in getting people’s attention.

Verbally is available as a free download from the iTunes app store. Let us know what you think of it in the comments.

The solution to this problem is text-to-speech, a task that’s becoming increasingly useful as digital books and other forms of electronic text become more popular. There’s options about, one of which is Balabolka, a free text-to-speech program for Windows.

The Basics Of Balabolka

Getting started with Balabolka doesn’t require much instruction. When you start up the program, you are presented with a large, blank text area and a few audio controls. The text area will accept text straight from your clipboard, and you can start hearing text-to-speech by placing your cursor where you’d like the speech to begin. The controls at the top of the text area focus on volume and rate. The function of the volume control is obvious, of course, and the rate control determines the speed at which the voice will move through the text. Faster speeds will reduce the time required to move through a piece of text, but may make the text-to-speech conversion harder to understand.

Balabolka relies on the Microsoft Speech API for its output, which is why it has tabs for SAPI4 and SAPI5. The version of Windows you are using will determine the quality of the speech output. The latest version, SAPI5, is called Microsoft Anna. It is a female voice that is clear and generally easy to understand, although acronyms and unusual proper nouns can trip it up, a common flaw among text-to-speech programs.

Advanced Text-To-Speech Features

Besides the ability to change the rate and volume of the speech rendered with Balabolka, there are also some more advanced features available, which can be found under the Options menu tab. From here, you can make some minor changes to the pitch of the voice, or you can open a Settings menu.

In the Settings menu you’ll find a few options that can prove helpful. Under the Reading tab you will find the option to ignore certain characters while reading. This can be helpful if you have a piece of text with erroneous or strange characters that are tripping up the text-to-speech translation. Under the Pauses tab, you can force the voice to pause for a specified period of time at the end of a paragraph or sentence. In the Text tab, you can automatically remove certain formatting features in order to alter the way the text-to-speech translation sounds.

Batch File Conversion

Although you may want to listen to text-to-speech while at your computer, chances are that you’re interested in taking text-to-speech files with you so you can listen to them on your smartphone, MP3 player, tablet or other portable device. That’s while Balabolka’s batch conversion comes in.

Available under the Tools menu, this feature lets convert a large number of text files to audio recordings quickly. Doing this is quite simple by clicking the Add Files button and then finding the appropriate text files. Balabolka supports common text formats including DOC/DOCX, TXT, and ODT. The text-to-speech translation will follow the settings you determined in the main text area – for example, if you set the rate to -3 to make speech slower and easier to understand, all of the text documents you batch convert to speech will be converted at the -3 rate of speech. The output formats are numerous and include WAV, MP3 and MP4.

Conclusion

Balabolka is simple and free. It’s also fairly quick and lightweight – there is even a portable version of Balabolka that will run from an .exe without the installation of any files. There are other options that provide better text-to-speech quality, but you’re generally going to have to pay for them, and most people won’t have trouble understanding the text-to-speech translation Balabolka is capable of providing.

If you have any text-to-speech favourites of your own, let us know about them in the comments.

For years, I’ve been looking for a high-quality free voice to text software solution that will automatically take an audio recording and transcribe it to text. Such an application will put a lot of transcription companies out of work, but it’s a dream that I believe will come true some day. Recently, I conducted another hour-long interview and in my search for such applications, I saw Jeffry’s article on how to transcribe audio using Express Scribe.

Jeffry did an awesome job covering most of the features of this application, but as he said in the last paragraph of the article – he hardly scratched the surface. A notable advanced use he noted is the application’s ability to dock recordings and integration with speech recognition software. In this article I’m going to show you how you can take advantage of those two features.

Dock & Speech Recognition to Transcribe Your Voice

Obviously, the first thing I wanted to do with Express Scribe (Windows/Mac) is to stream an audio file to automatically transcribe the interview. This is my pipe dream, so I had to try. Although the odds were good it wouldn’t work, because the computer would only be able to learn my voice. Either way, the first step is to enable the built-in voice recognition service in Windows 7 and train it to understand your voice.

Go into the Control Panel, click on “Ease of Access“, and then select “Speech Recognition.”

First select “Start Speech Recognition“, and this will enable the feature as part of your Windows experience. I very highly recommend that you click on “train your computer to better understand you” and go through the training sequence at least twice – it only takes about 5 to 7 minutes at a time. Speak as plainly and articulately as possible.

To enable speech recognition in Express Scribe, just click on Options and select the “Speech to Text” tab. You’ll see the default profile show up in the dropdown box. This is the profile that you’ve just trained to recognize your speech pattern. Click on “Add” so the profile shows up in the list.

Now that it’s ready to transcribe, the first thing I wanted to try was bringing in voice audio files and seeing how well the software transcribed them. You do this by clicking on “Dock” and then choosing the Audio File Transfer Method.

Using this selection, you then choose a folder where your external recording device, like a digital recorder, downloads files to your computer. This will import all of those files to Express Scribe. I used this feature to import audio files from my interview folder. Here’s what the transcription looked like.

As you can see, the transcription was pretty much garbage. Nine times out of ten the transcription can’t even get started, and when it does it will write a few words and then completely bomb out. Obviously, the automatic transcription of audio files that I dream about still hasn’t come true, but that doesn’t mean I’ve given up on Express Scribe. There’s still the fact that it is trained to recognize and transcribe my voice. So I could still make use of the software to transcribe my own voice recordings and dictations.

To do this live (with your microphone), all you have to do is plug in your microphone and then click “Dock” and choose the Audio Cable option. The following screen will appear, showing the audio level of your microphone and that it’s actively streaming in the live audio. Go ahead and start dictating.

Of course, if you’ve recorded your dictation on a digital voice recorder, all you have to do is hook up your voice recorder output to the microphone input of your computer, and this feature will stream in the audio (that’s actually what it’s intended for – docking your recorder).

When I was finished dictating a long sentence, I clicked “done” to see how well the software performed. As you can see below – pretty stellar. Only one word wrong (and should have been “can”), but that was because I stumbled when I spoke.

This is pretty impressive, and I can see using Express Scribe to transcribe a whole lot of recordings that I make while I’m mobile – it’ll save a whole lot of time in transcribing my audio, because I’ll only have to go back and edit any small mistakes.

The accurate transcription from audio to text is not an easy feature to find in most free voice to text software, so it was surprising to see Express Scribe do such a good job. Another nice feature is the “Incoming” feature within the Options menu. Here, you can configure a certain recording directly on your hard drive for automatic syncing.

Configure a Dropbox account linked to this directory, and you have a fast way to upload your recordings from anywhere straight to the directory where your Express Scribe software is waiting to transcribe your dictation.

In Express Scribe, you’ll have a really fast and convenient way to quickly transcribe any of your own audio recordings accurately and fast – especially if you automate it by syncing it to a Dropbox account. So, give Express Scribe a try and see how well it transcribes your voice. Share your experience in the comments area below.

Sometimes, the most matter of fact questions can knock you off kilter. The ‘tell me about yourself’ interview ice-breaker makes the ‘most difficult interview questions’ list quite often. A smart off the cuff answer works, but it works better if you have the answer prepared.

If preparation is the key, browse through these eight interview websites and bulletproof your job search with the wealth of technical and non-technical interview questions and answers listed there.

CareerCup

Careercup is a resource of tech interview questions from companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and a lot of others. The site was started in 2005, so to date the bank of questions is 3,000 strong. You can trawl through the questions by using the dropdown for Companies, Job Titles, and Topics. The answers and solutions are supplied by the community of readers. You can add your own interview questions and also engage with others in the chat room.

Glassdoor

We have featured this free career website and community before but it was as a salary comparison tool. Since then, the site has come out of beta and developed into a deeper microscope for the job market with company reviews, salary comparisons, and interview tips. The site lists interview questions across the spectrum of job listings from sales to technology. The site is well organized with each company getting a page that starts with an overview and hives off into details like interview difficulty rating, questions asked, and other information like background checks, interview schedules, etc. It’s definitely is one of the better job information sites out there.

Monster

The go-to site for career and job listing information has a well covered career advice section with a section devoted to interviewing. Check out all the articles listed under The Tough Questions. A few hints from How to Answer Five Difficult Interview Questions and 100 Potential Interview Questions should help you ace any interview.

Job Search (About.com)

The wide variety of guides on About.com is always more than useful. It’s the same with the roll of interview questions and best answers for each of them. Follow all the links and check them out.

Management Consulting Case Interviews

We move away from all the general and technical interview websites with this one. As the name says, the site is all about in-depth interview questions for those who are interested in getting into management consulting. The case studies are arranged by type, industry, and consulting firm.

Xor Swap

The technical interview website is simple in looks but its list of actual interview questions asked by IT companies could be more than useful. Each question also has the answer and you can add your own. Filter the questions against the company using the list of companies on the right.

Geek Interview

The site of course, has a nicely laid out interview preparation section with a lot of questions for the software programmer or coder. The site leans towards the Indian IT scene but the questions should be universal for an IT interview. The site also has tutorials on technology, tech articles, career related articles, job postings, certification questions and guides, online tests and other study aids.

Common Interview

The website with a barebones search engine-like interface is actually a dynamic, community driven collection of most common general purpose and technical interview questions. The search box gave me a bunch of unrelated results (the Advanced Search targets them better), so I guess it’s better to use the menu on the top. Not all questions have answers but the collection of interview questions and answers is quite large.

Armed with the best answers, you can further polish your interview tackling skills with 5 Sites with Job Interview Tips to Help You Ace Your Interview or take the visual route with 5 Video Channels for Learning Basic Job Interview Skills. As you prepare for the next ‘blind date’ with the job board, let us know about the toughest interview question you ever had to counter.

Image: Shutterstock

With the recorded voice from the phone call and a clip of the person denying the accusation, I set to work trying to find a way to prove that the voices were one and the same.

I admit that I’m a bit obsessed with voice technologies. This is why I’ve been waiting for Google Voice to become more advanced with its voice recognition technology, and it’s why I love PC voice control apps like Tazti. However, when it comes to digitally comparing voices, I was at a loss. You’ve probably seen those spy movies where the computer can automatically identify the voice of a known criminal with the voice print alone.

To be honest, once I discovered Sonogram Visible Speech, I realized that spectrogram voice technology actually is currently a viable way to solidly identify a person by their voice alone.

Understanding Spectrogram

If you know about chemical isotopes, then you know that with isotopes, chemists can identify the chemical makeup of compounds by isolating the basic elements and using the breakdown to identify the individual components of any mixture. In much the same way, an audio spectrogram breaks down audio sound into basic frequencies. The interesting thing about the human voice is that no one speaks in one frequency. Your mouth, nasal passages and the structure of your voice box determines the mixture of frequencies that make up your somewhat unique voice.

Sonogram Visible Speech is a free spectrogram software application that will take video or audio files and break down the audio track into the entire spectrum – all of its frequencies throughout the entire time frame of the track. A completed spectrogram looks like the image below.

As you can see, the bottom track looks like the basic sound wave that you’d see in a program like Audacity, however the center pane displays each segment of the sound file in its entire frequency layout. The amazing thing about this software is that there are many other waveforms you can use to examine your sound file. These are especially for advanced users.

You can configure how each of those wave forms displays by going into the the “Options” menu, and selecting “General Adjustment.” Here you can define how the logarithmic graphs calculate output and the general display setup of all available charts.

If the sound is fairly quiet, or the voice you’re analyzing is a whisper, you may want to consider using the logarithmic frequency display. You enable it from the “Options” menu and select “Logarithmic Frequency.” This will somewhat “magnify” the significant areas of frequency in the spectrogram.

This can really help to identify clear frequency patterns that identify someone from the sound of their voice. If you’re completely lost, and you don’t know where to start, clicking on “Help” and going to “Online Help” will open up the very well written Sonogram Online Help manual. This is a great place to start if you’re new to spectrogram audio analysis.

An Experiment With Spectrograms Using Ghost Hunting

The beauty of this software is that it is good for many different uses. One of the artifacts that comes up often in ghost hunting, a personal interest of mine, is “electronic voice phenomenon” – where the voice of an apparition or ghost allegedly shows up on audio recordings. These recordings are scattered throughout the web, so I decided to pull a few off of the ghost hunter websites and do a spectrogram analysis.

The spectrogram shows that the frequencies of the voice are generally low, but to get a better picture of the voices in the recording, you need to open up the additional waveforms. The Autocorrelation View calculates “pitch” in the time frame where you hover the mouse.

The “ghost” has an average pitch frequency of about 129.0 hz. Scrolling to the end of the recording where you hear the investigator’s voice, the calculated pitch frequency is about 208.0 hz (which makes sense because it’s a female voice and the ghost recording sounds male.)

Opening up the Fast Fourier display reveals even more detail about the voices. This chart quickly breaks down the primary frequencies and displays them in a color code.

In this case, the breakdown of frequencies is spread apart, with some high, but a good number of low frequencies in the mix as well. However, the investigator in the room is clearly speaking in a voice that is clustered in frequency more toward the high end of the range, as shown here.

This quick analysis proved that the two voices are quite different, but this is only a basic example of the capabilities of this powerful software. Basically, any situation where a breakdown of frequencies of a sound wave can help – this is the software for you. It’s easy to learn, quick to set up and configure, and it performs as well or better than any paid spectrogram software on the market.

Do you have any projects that could use a spectrogram? Have you ever tried Sonogram Visible Speech? Share your insight in the comments section below.