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Speaking dictionary/pronunciation help, Part 1–the pedagogy

On the LRC PC’s,  you can copy foreign language text to the clipboard (or with non-western languages to an MS-Word file) and have a wizard (right click, choose: “Read Clipboard”) pronounce for you, like so:

student_writing_mey_halffilled_selected_deskbot_merlin_cropped

The following languages are supported:

Language Demo
American English  
French Le Monde
German  
Italian  
Japanese Japanese
Korean  
Portuguese (Brazilian)  
Russian Gazetta
Spanish El Pais@10:34

Note 1: In reality, the audio quality is smoother than in these demos which needed to be recorded over the network using MSTSC, because of Windows Media Encoder not being able to capture the special video overlay of the MS-Agent technology.

Note 2: Deskbot has problems understanding the Windows clipboard text encoding of some non-western languages. For these languages, instead of simple double-clicking the deskbot wizard to have him read out the clipboard (which would result in gibberish), paste your text into a MS-Word document and have deskbot read this document for you instead: Use the Deskbot option “Read Word document” (allowing Word to translate the character  encoding into a format Deskbot can understand enough to aurally (even if not visually) display).

Listen to the Deskbot’s self-introduction when you log in to learn how to change the default language to the language you study.

You can also change other settings (in the LRC automatically limited to your current user session) by right-clicking the  deskbot notification-area icon deskbot-notification-area-icon

Or if you want to configure your own Windows XP computer to support foreign language text-to-speech, the procedure and settings we recommend are documented in Part 2.

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