Spell Up: A Chrome Experiment | Hacker News Reader

Spell Up: A Chrome Experiment

spellup.withgoogle.com

23 pointsmarkhemmings19 comments

Spell "tent", spell "tamed" spell "taint". Every time I replay the noise I'm still unable to distinguish between these three possibilities. I'm not sure what you want me to spell.

The algorithm to convert my spoken letter to the letter that the game thinks I am guessing is wrong often enough to be annoying.

Lastly, it's too slow: I have to pause for several seconds between each guess.

The game worked for me. But the voice recognition of individual letters was abysmally slow / bad on my laptop. I guess it gives a better sense of how far back voice recognition is.

All the voice recognition packages I've used have a dedicated "spell this" mode, usually activated by a hot word like "spell" or similar. In the dedicated mode, my recollection is that one can use the phonetic alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie, etc) in lieu of trying to get it to recognize the names of the letters, which are usually monosyllable and thus harder to pick up.

I haven't tried the system under discussion to know if it has such a mode or not.

Out of 10 tries for "G" I became angry and closed it. Also a laptop.

Same thing happened to me, except for the letter T, it kept recognizing it as the letter P...

Very cool. It was a bit too slow on letter recognition which made it frustrating. Also it heard me wrong from time to time.

Could benefit from using the word in a sentence. I could not understand what word it was trying to ask me to spell (and then it didn't help when the voice recognition of the letters was terrible and slow).

Good idea, but rough on the execution.

Experiment is the appropriate word. I found both understanding the speech synthesis for a single standalone out-of-context word to be impossible, and it was unable to understand clearly articulated single letters. Closed in frustration.

Game asked me to spell "khob". I didn't know what that was, and tried my best.

Turned out it was asking for COBRA.

Well. Hopefully that data was useful for something.

Game asked me to spell "devastation".

At the "T", I said "T" and it first heard it as "K", and next heard it as "P" (I had a retry bought).

To be fair, though, I was in a somewhat noisy room. Still, though, losing for something that's not my fault is a pretty frustrating experience.

Probably nice and all, but that website is empty.

This might be a really dumb question, but you are using Chrome, right?

Yes

What version of Chrome? The Speech libraries only work on v33 and up

Same here, but it works in an incognito tab

Might be an adblocker or something..

Tried the same, disabled all extensions, still no go.

So apparently Google wants to mine data for spellings? Great idea to make a game for that.

It is a good idea and Google uses games and tools to gather data on a fairly regular basis. Some examples:

-GOOG-411 (voice recognition)

-Ingress (location data)

-Google Image Labeler (image identification)

-Recaptcha (book / streetview ocr)

I'm sure there's more, but those are the ones off the top of my head.

EDIT: They obviously mine data from everything, but these are examples of overtly creating a tool/game to collect or improve a specific type of data.

Have to shout out the words for the laptop to recognize.

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