Happy Friday, folks! Tyler here with another Linguistic Weekly Recap.
This week was a big week for Linguistic, as we finally launched a feature that has been in demand for the past several weeks: article readthroughs!
(we’re still workshopping the name)
🎙 Turn any article into an audiobook
You read that right. Today we’re announcing Article Readthrough, a new utility that lives inside our article reader that allows you to read the entire article aloud using realistic voices powered by state-of-the-art neural acoustic models. Sounds pretty sophisticated, we know.
One of the most effective ways to improve your proficiency and internalize a language is by listening to it. Oftentimes, learners will forget what words or syllables are supposed to sound like, solely because of the environment they are in. If I am studying Chinese, but I only ever listen to English, there is a high likelihood that I will make mistakes with my tones when I attempt to speak. Pronunciation is everything, especially in tonal languages like Chinese.
With Audio Readthrough, you can turn any document you write or import into an audiobook. Look for the audio player in the toolbar to the right of the document (you may need to make sure your window is large enough first):
You also have the ability to skip or replay individual sentences, as well as toggle the speed in which they are read. As always, for any sentence you don’t understand, you can simply click on it to view its full meaning.
We’re actively seeking feedback, so please drop us a line to ask any questions, report any issues, or request any features!
🧹 Usability polish
While we still actively have features “in the hopper”, so-to-speak, we’ve also shipped this week (and are planning to ship more) usability improvements.
Notably, key icons and button now provide descriptive labels of what they do or where they take you, removing the guess-work from navigating the platform:
🐛 Bug Fixes
As always, we tackled a number of bugs this week as well. We fixed a long-standing issue on user profiles where everyone’s bio would just appear as [Object object], as well as issues that arose out of our launch of Article Readthrough.
In the words of Porky Pig – “that’s all, folks”! See you all next week 🐷✌🏻