textThing MFL (Topologika)


See textThing MFL on theTopologika web site.



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textThing had been selling pretty well for a year or two and we'd started work on upgrading to textThing Plus (which isn't described separately as it was mostly tightening stuff up). At that time the government started to get all itchy about Modern Foreign Languages. It had always been possible for users to customise textThing for other languages, but it took quite a bit of work and we didn't supply any starter texts. It was decided that we could tailor a version of textThing Plus so that it would be easy to use with other languages. To this end I added on-screen keys to deal with different character sets, set up a language management system in options which groups character sets with speech engines and got together over 100 texts in various European languages. We also included the L&H speech engines for Dutch, French, German, Spanish and Italian. These speech engines work pretty well; we decided not to include the more pricey engines as that would bump up the price and schools would end up paying for engines they wouldn't use. textThing MFL allows the use of any speech engine that complies with the Microsoft SAPI 4 standard so it's easy to add better quality engines if you want. Otherwise, from a student's perspective, it looks pretty much like textThing Plus as you can see from the screen shots.