Founder with an accent? Free offer from SayAfter.me

LOL, he says "your language is the language of Shakespeare, Milton and the Bible"... I wonder if it was meant to be funny , out of ignorance or arrogance...

As I've posted before, there is this sort of inherent imperialist bias people have with someone who does not have a good command or English. A hundred years ago, it may have been an indication of class (and to some degree still is today). But to look down and be utterly dismissive of someone because they have an accent is just plain dumb.

In PGs defense, just because someone is dumb doesn't mean people will cease to engage in such behavior. And given that the entrepreneur is the one on the selling side, it may behoove him/her to brush up on whichever accent is appealing to those to be sold.

I personally have several accents in English and I subconsciously switch from one to another depending on whom I'm speaking with. If necessary I change languages all together. Reality is, I am better able to connect with the other person this way.

You are right, robotic accents is not helpful (but hilarious though).

This app is mainly aimed at fixing the incorrect pronunciation of words, rather than the accent. If I ever get to add real human voices, then it will be even better.

I am terribly sorry if it came across like this. To be honest, the only reason I did not have a public subscription page is that I was too lazy to add logic for displaying buttons with "account signup" links, instead of "payment" ones for anonymous visitors. And now it bit me back today.

I just a deployed a fix for this issue, you can now see the prices at http://www.sayafter.me/subscribe

consider it a "dark pattern" to trick users https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6301378

$30/month

$70 for 3 months

$250 for 12 months.

Thank you for the detailed information.

The only feedback the user gets is a score for the current phrase, and highlighting of the words that he has mispronounced.

For example: If the phrase was "Where is the closest hospital?" but you said "Where is the closest clinic?", the application would highlight correct words in green and incorrect ones (hospital in this case) in orange/red depending on the word distance of "clinic" to "hospital")

When I say "word distance" I mean Levenshtein Distance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance

I never thought about giving basic information about English phonology, but you make a very valid point. I will look into this further, and please let me know about any detailed resources about this subject.

Thanks for the feedback.

Unfortunately currently neither webkit-speech-input nor Web Speech API supports recording of the user voice input.

I will look for alternative solutions though.

I didn't say I want to pay less. I said I want more for this price, and provided what I expect as my consumer behavior for each price range.

Thanks for the input. I am a total newbie when it comes to pricing, and open to any logical advice. Maybe I can add a message to the payment page that says something like "1 month of membership costs less than 1 hour of private 1 to 1 tutoring".

The "Have a wonderful" part is not uncommon but the "day" with long drawling "a" sounds super-strange to me.

I don't know. Should we table this discussion?

(Noting that some words, like "to table" have the opposite meanings in British and American English. When Americans say "table" the British say "shelve" and when the British say "table" the Americans say "put forward" or "propose.")

Oh, I'm not really disagreeing. The expression "a : b :: c : d" means a is to b what c is to d. There are just as many American accents as British accents, but Brits commonly refer to the conglomeration as American English, or to someone having "an American accent", and can have a similarly hard time differentiating between them.

So "British English" just refers to speaking English with one of many British accents, I'm guessing in this case approximately London English that is not Cockney.

That's not a mature response. I've look at your other comments and you look like you've made some worthwhile contribution but this comment is not what I visit HN daily for.

I agree with te_chris, it is not only arrogant but incorrect to make that assumption. I don't actually mind using 'color', but you live in a small world if you think that only a certain accent is relevant.

I used to teach English to non-native speakers. All of them wanted to learn English with an American accent. I think they are actually doing themselves a disservice because they fail to understand the subtle differences of class status an accent signals. A more British inflected accent is an easy way to signal higher education and status to an American. They go a bit gaga for British accents. It's also easier to fake a British accent.

European with a British accent representing.

More anecdata for you.

"Your anecdotal evidence is wrong - I want the opposite"

"No, your anecdotal evidence is wrong."

"My anecdotal evidence is right."

Yup, voice records are generated via Google speech API. Voice recognition is webkit speech input, only supported in Google Chrome. The application itself uses AngularJS.

This thing wouldn't have been possible without Google really.

I would accept that usage, but not "my pronunciations." The hard part for foreign speakers is that this usage is perfectly comprehensible, so it would rarely get corrected, while sounding bad to native speakers.

Which is, of course, quite harmful to someone who wants to improve. And yes, I know of no simple answer as to when to use 'code' vs. 'codes', but I will say that I think that 'source codes' is probably always wrong. At least, I am unable to find a sentence using that which sounds right, though it might be possible for it to be correct if you were talking about something other than the source code of a computer program.

Alright I just deployed a hotfix that includes TLDs for: com, net, org, de, fr, in, ru, it, tr.

I will also be adding lots of new content soon, so if you are interested in a particular theme for words/phrases ("flowers", "dog breeds", "Flirting 101" etc) just let me know. I will give them higher priority.