Check pronunciation with wechat convert

[ChTTay]

So the English version of wechat now has voice to text conversion (which the Chinese version has had for a little while). If you have the English version of wechat, it will automatically assume you’re speaking English.

 

You can still convert a Mandarin voice message. When you make a voice message you want to convert (see instructions in link below) you can just change the language to Mandarin by selecting the little dots on the top right of the conversion window.  

 

Anyway, try and send a voice message in Mandarin and see if the software picks up what you’re saying and turns it into text correctly. I am not sure how much margin for error you have but it’s a fun way to see if you’re understandable (to a computer). I tried a few messages in English and Chinese and it picked up what I was saying perfectly. Only issue with actually using this feature is punctuation is missing. You can add it in after. 

 

Thebeijinger article with basic intro and instructions:

https://www.thebeijinger.com/blog/2019/09/12/never-listen-another-voice-message-again-wechat-rolls-out-awesome-transcription

 

Give it a try and post how it goes 

[vellocet]

Oh.  I got excited for a moment.  I thought it could be used to decipher those inscrutable, 58 second voice messages inconsiderate Chinese people send me.  It's just a text-to-speech converter.

 

By the way, the author of that article is an awful person.  Two paragraphs of unstable ranting before he gets to the topic.  And he complains about others wasting his time!

[ChTTay]

3 hours ago, vellocet said:

It's just a text-to-speech converter.

Did you try it? 

[mungouk]

3 hours ago, vellocet said:

It's just a text-to-speech converter

 

No, it's a speech-to-text converter.

 

I just tried it and it worked for me, when I paid proper attention to my tones...

 

On my version of the APP (7.0.5) the little [...] menu gives a drop-down that lets you choose English, Mandarin or Cantonese as the recognised language.

 

Pretty cool.  

[suMMit]

Spent a half an hour making up tongue twisters and saying things i find challenging. 我们出去白云区吃鱼. 

紫砂 自杀 Too fun!

[mungouk]

So, I've wondered about this for a while.

 

What are some good Chinese tongue-twisters then...?

 

 

[suMMit]

i just made stuff up. like 吃水饺，然后睡觉. (btw, it put the comma in automatically.)

 

however, i said wuhan with various wrong tones and it came out as wuhan most of the times. so i dont know how good a test it is. I tried random peoples names and those worked. 

 

its also a quick way to look up the characters for a word that you can say but dont know the characters.

 

either way its fun.

[Lu]

9 hours ago, vellocet said:

I thought it could be used to decipher those inscrutable, 58 second voice messages inconsiderate Chinese people send me.

You can use it for that too! I don't like the listening-in Wechat is no doubt doing, but this feature is still fantastic.

[suMMit]

Playing around more with this. it can certainly differentiate tones 练习, 联系. I find it confidence building to see my sentences transcribed as exactly what i said.

 

It fairly consistently had me saying 

擦 cā (or other wrong characters) , when i was trying to say 他. I then reviewed how to properely pronounce initial T  and its now being transcribed as 他/她. 

 

Definetly think this is a useful tool.

 

 

[vellocet]

On 9/14/2019 at 12:51 AM, Lu said:

You can use it for that too! I don't like the listening-in Wechat is no doubt doing, but this feature is still fantastic.

How?  It just says when you record a message, you can choose to transliterate it into text.

[Lu]

3 hours ago, vellocet said:

How?

Go to the chat where the spoken message is in. Long-press the message bubble. It should now give you several options, including 'convert to text' (or something along those lines). Tap that option. Wait a few seconds, and voila!

[vellocet]

I got turn off speaker, add to favorites, reminder, delete, select.  Wechat 7.0.6. Reports it's the latest version and no updates are available.

[ChTTay]

2 hours ago, vellocet said:

 

I got turn off speaker, add to favorites, reminder, delete, select.  Wechat 7.0.6. Reports it's the latest version and no updates are available

 

Only the chosen few ... 

On 9/15/2019 at 11:26 AM, suMMit said:

I find it confidence building to see my sentences transcribed as exactly what i said.

This!

 

I just started saying random nonsensical things to see if it could keep up. No problems. Pretty impressive. Not sure I will use it often as a voice to text tool. It has been useful to check / validate I’m on the right track with pronunciation. 

[DonCachopo]

I prefer Google translate. It's more versatile, and in Windows can be used with stereo mix to transcribe anything sounding from computer 

[ChTTay]

8 hours ago, DonCachopo said:

 

I prefer Google translate

 

This isn’t a translation too. It’s a transcribing tool. One that it can be fun to test out your pronunciation, nothing serious ...