Week 2. Searching Sites

This week was full of reading... I don't remember when I read so many articles in one week. I have tried many new searching sites and made a mini survey on their usefulness. It was great experience, but the greatest thing was an article in the official Google blog “The future of search” posted by Marissa Mayer in 2008 (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/future-of-search.html). She talked about the future, about the future we live in now. The things which were unreal then, are real now. One of these things is voice searching. I thought that it is available only in phone address book, but thanks to Robert who showed me an article (http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-20058475-285/how-to-use-chromes-speech-to-text/), I had a chance to explore it on my computers. I have tried my desk computer with headphones and microphone, notebook, the experiment with tablet failed as I was short of memory to install the new chrome version. On Google translator I have tried 10 words. I pronounced them myself and then asked my seven year old daughter to do that. The words were random, chosen by my daughter :) It was interesting experience: out of ten words we get three correct! They are: hello, fox and who. I won't mention those which we failed to pronounce well enough for Google translator voice recognition program... Later I have tried http://www.web2voice.com and search videos and HTML5 demo Web site. The last one was the greatest of all! Try to pronounce something and be patient ;) By the way, if you are not working on Chrome, you won't be able to try this voice recognition 'toy' as it works only on the last edition of Chrome. Switch to Chrome and read my blog again ;-)





P.S. I am going to try this new 'toy' with my students. For searching it won't be very helpful, but for pronunciation and fun it will be great!