Video Game for Learning English

[A.Russell]

Thank you Tdol.

I have had one other report of the same thing, and I am almost certain that I know what is causing the crash.

Have you ever used speech recognition on your system before?

If not, then I suspect that I haven't included all of the dependencies in my installer. I think that you can speech enable your computer from the control panel or even from Microsoft Word. Here is a very simple tutorial for installing from Word:

http://www.microsoft.com/enable/trai...r_install.aspx

Could you please try it then run Magic Book again? If it works then I know I haven't included all the neccessary files in my installation package (Iwanted to keep it small).

[A.Russell]

I have just made an installation program that should Speech Enable your PC (if you didn't use the Microsoft Word method already). Once installed, instructions can be found in a ReadMe that can be found in the Program menu.

Here it is: http://www.my-virtual-classroom.com/...chEnablePC.msi

It is quite large. You can see why I was avoiding packaging all this with my application, can't you?

If you can7t handle the large download, there are instructions on how to do it from your Windows CDs here: http://www.microsoft.com/enable/trai..._overview.aspx

Once your PC has been speech enabled, you will be able to use it with other applications that also use Microsoft Speech (like Word and Notepad).

@Tdol; If you could confirm that speech enabling makes MB run without crashing would be great.

[Tdol]

Working now- the recognition stuff on my machine was the manufacturer's. Will play and report back tomorrow.

[A.Russell]

Didn't my speech engine installer work? Did you reset your machine after running it?

[Tdol]

It worked- I got through fine. Will test on a non-native speaker at the weekend. I'm not a gamer so this is probably my ineptness, but it took me a while to work out that I had to read the instructions- I was waiting for what I had to read, then eventually I twigged. It recognised my pronunciation fine.

[A.Russell]

Glad to hear it. I'll have to add something to the installer to promt people to speach enable their systems if SAPI isn't installed, or at least have it so that it issues an error rather than a crash. I am keen to move on to the next stage, and don't want to develop this further, especially since the response hasn't been exactly overwhelming.

It really is pretty simple, and I am not getting much feedback about it. At least I am now aware of the issues involved in trying to distribute a program using Microsoft Speech.

For the next demo I will make it a bit more exciting and have a character that you can control to explore a map.

[Tdol]

Originally, I did have speech enabled, but it was not the MS stuff, but something Toshiba had put on, which the program didn't like. When I added the download, it worked fine.

[A.Russell]

MB uses the Microsoft ASR engine. There are other engines available, too, but for most of them I need a special (and usually expensive) license to include them in my software. Microsoft's is a free download. I have tested a couple of other commercial engines that I'd like to integrate, too -particulary Fonix, for those of you who are interested in this sort of thing.

[Tdol]

Are they better than the free ones?

[A.Russell]

Are they better than the free ones?

They are usually more sophisticated. The commercial engines often start out by modifying an open source project. There are companies that specialise in various areas of ASR. The reason I said I like Fonix is because it is multi-platform and is particularly good in noisy environments (like classrooms).

Carnegie Mellon are developing a speech recognition chip. It will be a bit like graphics cards are used to accellerate graphics that would otherwise be extremely taxing on the CPU, except for processing speech.

I have just uploaded another installation package of MB. This one should also have translations in Japanese, Chinese (simplified) and German. I only have Japanese computers set to Engish, so I haven't tested if it will actually display in those language. Someone please let me know. It should also check your system and ask you to download my SAPI installation pack if it isn't already installed. If anyone still experiences a crash, again, let me know.

http://www.my-virtual-classroom.com/...icBookDemo.exe

The instructions once installed are still only in English.