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Chrome feature: How to Pronounce English Words

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cyberdiva:
Martin Brinkmann has a piece on ghacks.net today about an extension in the Chrome browser called "How Do You Say" that will pronounce English words, phrases, and even sentences that you either add manually or highlight on a web page.  As far as I can tell, the feature is available only for English.  Brinkmann was moderately enthusiastic about it, though it's limited to just the words it has in its database.  Still, since Donation Coder has a large international membership, I thought this might possibly be of interest.  You can find the article at http://www.ghacks.net/2012/01/06/learn-how-to-pronaunce-english-words/ (and yes, pronounce is misspelled in the URL  :)  ). I don't use Chrome, so I wasn't able to try it out.  I might add that I first did a search of the forum to see if this has already been mentioned.  I searched on pronounce English words and received no hits, but the forum search software did provide the following feedback:

Adjust Search Parameters
You may have meant to search for pronounce Englisher words.
 ;D

Renegade:
Interesting. It pronounced "Floccinaucinihilipilification" pretty well. I'd keep the "nihili" with short i's where it had long i's, but hey, it works! :)

For "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" it was bang on!

It butchered "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis", but it was recognizable. The stresses there were pretty bizarre.

It got "jujube" right. (The final "e" isn't pronounced, which is a mistake that many English speakers make. i.e. jew-jew-bee is wrong.)

No results at all for "frack", however it got "fracking" right.

It had long o's for the first o's in "otorhinolaryngologist" where I'd use short o's. (I think that's a Canadian vs. British pronunciation issue.)

It could use an autofocus on it though as it's a pain to click in the box. Still, it's very well done.

daddydave:
Interesting. Try highlighting "tune" and "and" and it will give you three different pronunciations for each, but it is still the one guy's voice (didn't sound robotic to me, just seemed like a slight British accent (to an American)). The volume oscillated up and down when I highlighted several words at a time.

--

I prefer forvo's approach, you can get a human to pronounce it for you, add your own words, record pronunciations yourself using a builtin Flash applet, and hear native speakers from several different countries or regions. Plus it's not English only. You can also use your favorite browser search addons to look up highlighted text in Forvo just like any search engine. I have no affilation with them other than being a user (yes, I am kind of derelict in my pronouncing duties, I have only pronounced one word there so far).



And if anyone knows Punjabi, go here and pronounce ainvayi for me, thanks.  ;)

eleman:
Pronounce is a firefox add-on for the same purpose. If you're like me, effectively locked into firefox thanks to the extensive and currently unmatched add-on set, despite all the memory leaks and sometimes slow performance, this would do the job for you.

How I wish Opera had one third of the extension park of Firefox...

Curt:
Pronounce is a firefox add-on for the same purpose. -eleman (January 07, 2012, 02:26 AM)
--- End quote ---

Thank you!  :up:

Works with Firefox 8.01

Edited:
I can see on the Mozilla page that some people never figured out to first add the necessary button to their toolbar, and therefore assumed the add-on doesn't work. But it does.

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