iOS 5 includes a voice assistant and speech recognition software called SIRI. Is there a chance that SIRI or similar voice recognition technique could be integrated into Skritter so that user can speak out Mandarin tone prompts/characters and SIRI could identify if they were correct?

This will be one hot feature people will love to be added to any Chinese language SRS program.

@Skritter team please comment.

I think software's such as Rosetta Stone have similar features and it grades you on your pronunciation. I'm not sure how well it works though.

As far as I know, Siri just records your voice, sends it to an Apple server, and gets the text which was recognized back.

So Siri could never grade you on your pronounciation as it does not get tones, etc. I guess if might be a solution for whole sentences but not for short words, where misunderstanding is inevitable due to the homonyms in the Chinese language.

This must be possible but not using siri. But google translate allows you to speak and then translates, so if that was incorporated, Skritter could then check the output from google translate to see if it's correct. I use this and I have to say its fairly good. This would be a completely new feature though as skritter doesn't test you on pronunciation. I have used Rosetta stone and it's ok but I found it time consuming to learn and unbelievably boring. Basically for speaking nothing beats just speaking to another mandarin speaker, but if skritter could encorporate an additional test using some voice recognition to test pronunciation that would be great.

if you want to see if your spoken words are the ones you mean and if you say them correctly try the APP called DRAGON DICTATION. it works perfectly but you need a wifi connection. good luck.

I have this feature on my wishlist of features to do some day; I know how I would use the algorithms to detect tones and such and it would be awesome. But it would take a lot of development effort, so it hasn't been worth doing yet.

Siri will support Mandarin in iOS6, so you may be able to ask it "今天下雨吗？" or something and see if it understands you, and it should be able to try to transcribe whatever you say. Will be interesting to see how picky it is about tones.

@nick
That would be awesome! You guys are never too ambitious are you! :D

@alanmd
There was a discussion a while back on the forum about voice recognition, where one user was sad that they couldn't be understood by the phone (I think in Japanese).
The general answer was, however, that even native speakers have trouble unless they speak in a very forced way. For example I have a (not very strong) Scottish accent so voice recognition in English never works, despite being a native speaker! I have to put on an American accent to make it work.

I'd be pleased to see if the Mandarin in iOS6 works better than that.

To test that out I'll write this replying using the iPhone 4S's voice recognition. I'm speaking in a normal speed is my normal voice. As you can see from the first two sentences it's not perfect but it's also not complete failure

[typing again- I didn't edit that at all, even punctuation etc. really quite impressive- were you discussing voice recognition in general or the latest iterations?]