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Peaksay Weekly Update: Custom Pronunciation Lists

Happy Yom Kippour and Mid-Autumn Festival, everybody!

It’s been a few weeks since my last update. Like many of you, I’ve found this new school year both intense and challenging in a hundred crazy ways.

Hang in there, guys! I know how tough it is.

I’ve also been delighted to hear from teachers who are using Peaksay in their own classes. Whether it’s sharing conversations and pronunciation lists with students, talking about Peaksay with colleagues, creating your own custom content, or offering priceless feedback–from the bottom of my heart, thank you. You are awesome.

Peaksay Alpha has improved tremendously since we launched in June, and it’s going to keep getting better, thanks to your support.

This week I’m excited to show off a slew of different changes, including Pronunciation List Search. Easily search through a database of user-created lists, sorting by language, difficulty, and title keywords.

Search for any user-created pronunciation list.

Practice Mode has also been added to each pronunciation game. Practice before you play for points–you can never lose, so redo any sentence as many times as you want!

Use Practice Mode to master every sentence.

And here are more changes:

  • Speech recognition is much better, for both the Pronunciation Game and Speaking Mode. Peaksay now properly parses accents, spacing, punctuation, and other variations between spoken and written text.
  • After you manually stop recording, Peaksay will now wait up to two seconds, improving transcription accuracy.
  • Search has been significantly improved. Peaksay can now understand any search query you type, regardless of accent, capitalization, or other variations.
  • You can now preview sentences for custom pronunciation lists on the home page.
  • Changed the Pronunciation Game error sound to something less harsh.
  • Fixed bug with tutorials auto-starting in Learn Mode, even if you’ve played before.
  • Fixed bug where longer sentences were being partially hidden in the Pronunciation Game.
  • Fixed bug where sensitive user information was being exposed to the client when loading a conversation.

Check out the improvements, and please let me know what you think! ? 

Warmly,

Hugo


Whats Next:

  • Overhaul conversation creation and editing. Descriptions, drag and drop, image cropping, voice recording, customized settings, and more.
  • Overhaul leaderboard page. Split up leaderboard scores into different categories by mode and difficulty and protect user’s private information.
  • Add a landing page.
  • Add user statistics, such as conversation and score history.
  • Add power-up tooltips and customization.