– a Singaporean teacher's storeroom 🖖
pear deck is an interactive presentation tool. it’s essentially ppt+socrative. a few things to note:
1. the free acct only allows importing up to 5 slides
2. can’t see how presentations can be exported in the free acct (not sure abt paid acct)
3. supports unicode
4. the paid/premium educator acct costs USD11.99/mth, or USD8.33×12/yr
a quick overview:
last november when tuck soon and i experimented signing up for an account when microsoft launched the programme, it doesn’t work. these two days when i tried it again, it works perfectly!
if you are an MOE teacher with an ICON account, sign up today and install up to 5 copies of licensed Office 365 today. works for both Windows and Mac OSes.
enjoy (:
do u see the analog-digital pair? the analog wave followed by the digital 1-0. by none other than Sony VAIO (：
transcribing voice recordings is a painful process for non-professional transcribers like me. if only one can pipe the recordings into a computer, and the transcription will be automatically done. wait, yes, it’s possible now, albeit with a relatively low-mid accuracy.
thanks to Si Hui who introduced to me someone’s attempt to convert recorded audio to text on a Mac that started my exploration in the Windows environment (:
the software that you will need to transcribe Chinese audio recordings into Chinese text:
1. Audacity (or any audio playback software that allows you to select the Output path)
2. VB-Audio Virtual Cable (or any other software that captures all the Sound Out, and directs it to any system software listening to any audio output; this is the Windows equivalent of MacOS’ Soundflower)
3. 讯飞输入法 iFly Input PC version (this is the software responsible for the Chinese audio-to-text conversion)
install the above software in any order. to get them working together, follow these steps:
1. load Audacity. open the voice recording. In the “Audacity Device Toolbar”, select Playback Device and set it to CABLE input (VB-Audio virtual cable).
2. load 讯飞输入法’s 语音悬浮窗 (find it within Start menu). click on the 语音悬浮窗 to set it to “点击说话” to pause recognition.
3. load any word processor (e.g. microsoft word, notepad).
4. go back to Audacity. begin Playback of voice recording.
5. click on 语音悬浮窗 to set it to “请说话” (voice recognition begins)
6. switch to word processor, and maintain it as focus (with blinking cursor in text edit area)
7. your automated transcription should now begin, as follows:
things to note:
1. 讯飞输入法 requires an ACTIVE internet connection to function.
2. 讯飞输入法 may from time to time stop by itself. i think this happens when the server is too busy. one will need to repeat step 5 to reactivate the audio-to-text conversion.
3. if you would like to use Windows 8.1’s built-in voice recognition software, pls go ahead. but i can safely advise, be prepared to get near-zero accuracy. maybe the to be released windoze 10’s version would be better 😛
once it’s done, it’s time listen to your original voice recording, and begin the cleaning up of the automatically generated text. while the recognition accuracy is still not high enough, this process has however sped up my rate of transcription significantly. your mileage may vary, but i hope it helps in your work too.
oh btw, my all-time favourite software to assist in transcription remains as VoiceWalker.
enjoy (:
— update 9/5, 1335hr —
checked my mail after lunch, and cloudHQ‘s CEO Mr. Senad Dizdar has dropped an email to offer an 1-year free trial of cloudHQ’s Premium service. time to explore the service further (:
—
today, a new toy arrived:
have bought the acer chromebook 13 to explore the Google Chrome OS ecosystem. an immediate problem would be to gain access to my working files on Dropbox. while files in dropbox could be retrieved, somehow i suspect the access would not be as fast if files were to be retrieved from Google Drive instead.
so, the next thing to do is to mirror the files in-between dropbox and google drive. while i could do it manually through one of my systems’ hard disk. i was wondering if there’s something more clever — a cloud service that works on the cloud storages, in the cloud.
and after some googling, i came upon cloudHQ.
signed up for a free 14-days trial account, and in no time, my files on dropbox started syncing. when i checked back in an hour, was pleasantly surprised to see 2.9GB of files synced. but the syncing stopped, as i have used up the free 2GB bandwidth. in fact, it was exceeded by 0.9GB. posted a tweet to gain another 2GB, and the sync was restarted to continue transfer of the remaining 2GB. hope the free bandwidth is enough to complete the job.
i like cloudHQ for its easy to navigate menu options. one concern that i had was what if there were some glitch, and files were overwritten unintended. i am pleasantly surprised to find cloudHQ offering an option to back up changed files before they were overwritten. activated the option and hope to see it in action.
looks like i have used up my 4GB of free transfer as i am writing this post. hope i would be able to receive the free 1 year trial of the Premium Plan, and i’ll be able to post more about the cloudHQ experience.