Getting started

This is a blog for the development of the Play and Speak speech training application for children. It is an application to help children learn how to read with the help of voice recognition technology. Along with Elizabeth Duong, I, Bill Giang will aim to complete a working prototype by the end of the semester.

So far our concept utilises voice recognition software (e.g. Dragon Naturally Speaking) along with our own application (most likely developed in Flash) to record speech then compare it to a word that will display on screen. I conceptualised this process the following way:

01. Application begins
02. Flash randomly picks a word from a database and displays it on screen.
03. Voice input captured with Dragon
04. Voice is converted to text and saved as a text file (speech to text)
05. Flash then reads the text file and compares the converted speech to the word displaying on screen
06. If it is correct, Flash will display the result as correct. Else, Flash will ask user to try again
07. 01-05 continued til end of words (maximum of 20 or so)
08. Overall result displayed on screen (e.g. 17 out 20)
09. Choice to start the game again.

After some research on Dragon, I learnt that Dragon can convert speech to text then directly input that text to specific applications. If it is able to write directly into Flash as text input, some unnecessary steps can be cut out.