3 comments

  • edwcross 6 minutes ago
    I tried running the suggested code (curl -sL ...) but inadvertently did not check it was missing quotes around '\r'. So after a while I started seeing some errors:

    [error] No valid link found according to patterns for 'aboad'

    [error] No valid link found according to patterns for 'absob'

    [error] No valid link found according to patterns for 'acoss'

    I thought "well, there's quite a lot of words I need to learn in English", but after seeing 'addess' and 'adventue' I thought "wait, this is not ight".

    Fixing it helps, but there are still missing expressions, such as "add up", "a couple", etc.

  • myfonj 30 minutes ago
    I've made something (probably) very similar for quick GB vs US pronunciation check that also leeches on Google's snapshot of what I believe is a licensed copy of the Oxford collection the same way the shell script does, but mine "runs in browser's URL bar" instead. It's a super tiny dataURI HTML document, intended to be bookmarked with a keyword (say, "say"):

        data:text/html;charset=utf-8,<title>US-GB pronunciation 2.0.2</title><body onload=x='https://ssl.gstatic.com/dictionary/static/sounds/20160317/' text=snow bgcolor=black><button onfocus=click() onclick=a.src=x+i.value+'--_us_1.mp3';a.play()>US</button><input id=i placeholder=(shift+)tab value="%s"><button onfocus=click() onclick=a.src=x+i.value+'--_gb_1.mp3';a.play()>GB</button><audio id=a onplay=i.focus()></audio>
    
    so when I do

        Alt+D, "say something", Enter
    
    then hitting Tab plays it in British and Shift+Tab plays it in US English. It uses older 2016 batch, because I totally adore the US voice in it: just listen to "music" [1] and tell it isn't pure ASMR.

    (I'm afraid it just a matter of time they will prevent our mischief, though.)

    [0] oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com uses the same collection. [1] https://ssl.gstatic.com/dictionary/static/sounds/20160317/mu...

    • IAmBroom 26 minutes ago
      Dubiously, I clicked. Yeah, I could listen to her read the dictionary as I waft off to sleep...
      • myfonj 21 minutes ago
        Ha ha, really glad to hear that. (The fact is, I am kinda freak/junkie about human voices, and that particular one stands really high on my list of irresistible tingles-inducing specimens. So happy to hear I am not alone.)
  • giancarlostoro 1 hour ago
    English is not my first language, and I didn't realize it was "google say" at first, so I was sitting here scratching my head wondering how you could possibly pronounce this word. Interesting that it's a shell script and not so much a browser extension or something. I guess this is for when you're knee deep in terminals?
    • pooyamo 48 minutes ago
      > I guess this is for when you're knee deep in terminals?

      One can use it directly in terminal or it can be used as a dependency tool in other scripts similar to the way other UNIX tools are used. For example I use it as a pronunciation player in my dictionary dict-master [1]. It's a shell script too.

      Another example (run two times so it uses the cache the second time):

        echo this unix pipeline is poor man text to speech | xargs -n 1 gsay
      
      [1]: https://github.com/pvonmoradi/dict-master