AI Chinese

[M.E.Townsend]

Hello, I had the similar problem and wrote an email to AIChinese.com yesterday.

Got their answer today and now it works for me. Here is their response:

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Hello,

The development team has come back to me and told me that:

You need to check the box "remember" when setting the flash microphone option. This would allow microphone can be accessed by the flash in the later applications. That also explains why you can see the microphone input at the beginning but not in the practice.

We would explicitly include this message to remind users in the new release expected on Sep 28th 2010. Again thanks for your email! Should you have any further issue/comments,please don't hesitate to contact us.

Best regards, AIChinese.com

AI Speech Ltd

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[Meng Lelan]

Ok, well, that worked. The scoring seems inconsistent. Sometimes it said my "z" was ok and sometimes not - and it didn't tell me what was wrong with my "z". Overall it was ok but maybe a pronuncation drill section would be good for targeting problem phonemes. But we don't have anything else on the market to compare with AI Chinese. Or are there others that are similar to AI Chinese that we can run a comparison?

[M.E.Townsend]

Hello Meng Lelan, when I logged in AIChinese.com. I just realized your name is in Rank of Points, no.4. I've been playing with it for a while and would be interested to know if there is anything similar to compare in the market place too. Anyone got any idea? I heard of Rosetta Stone but they're so expensive...

[Meng Lelan]

Actually my students and I were all playing on it. I don't know what to think of AI Chinese. So far it seems to work ok for tones. For some consonants it seems to go bonkers, even if you get it right it marks you wrong especially for the "easy" consonants like "m" and "b". I don't know if anyone here is getting the same thing happening. Rosetta Stone, I've never seen or used it. Some time ago there was some guy in the forums here with something called Quooco or something like that - it was supposed to be in the works at the time and was going to be similiar to the concept behind AI Chinese - but nothing has seemed to materialize from that.

[M.E.Townsend]

From a technical point of view, I think it is pretty challenging for the computer to rate consonants right because they last so short! I agreed that AIChinese.com is handling tones very well. For the initials and finals, there is one guy on Chinesepod proposed one way to get the best out of AIChinese.com. He said, "The way I do this exercise is when I can say a word 10 times in a row with 4 stars, correct tone, and no red flag on either the initial or the final (a perfect score) - then I can move to the next word. I think you will find it challenging."

I tried it and more or less I think it works better! Not sure how many people can stick to this method. After all, I think acquiring a language skill would always need repetition. Will report back after more time and more test.

[chinopinyin]

@ Meng Lelan

Qooco chinese http://www.qoocochinese.com/ is up and running. They use speech and tone recognition technology to rate you both on sentences and words. I wrote my opinion about them in this post http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/23840-qooco-skritter-for-your-mouth/

I'll definitely give AIchinese a try, but want to wait a couple of days till their new release is out.

Has anybody experience with both Qooco chinese and AI chinese?

[M.E.Townsend]

Thanks! I would try Qooco chinese and let you know how I think about the two.

[roddy]

Anyone interested in trying AIChinese.com themselves may want to check out our Chinese New Year offer - a free week of premium access, which with the free trial gives you a full fortnight to try it out.