New SayMore 3 Beta Release

[John Hatton]

(Apologies for cross-posting)

 

Thanks to everyone who have been trying out SayMore 3 beta, and to those helping with updating the French and Russian localizations. The team has made dozens of improvements and two new features:

 

·         You can now add file at the project level. These could be files that describe the project, how it was funded, etc.

·         The Manual Segmenter Dialog now sports a zoom in for finer control).

 

We’d like to invite you to get the latest version and send us your feedback.

 

John Hatton

Senior Software Engineer/Program Manager

Language Software Development

SIL International

 

 

>Special thanks to users Sarah Moeller and Tim Gaved, SayMore users who served as consultants and champions for this release. Thanks too to Mari-Sisko Khadgi, who gave us encouragement and several great uservoice requests.

 

What's New in Version 3

IMDI Archiving

SayMore users contributing to archives can now export SayMore data to a folder that conforms to IMDI format. You can then open the folder in IMDI applications like ARBIL for further annotation and submission.

Project Tab

SayMore 3 adds a "Project" tab for the first time:

Project Metadata

• Title
• Funding Project Title
• Description
• Vernacular Language
• Location/Address
• Region
• Country
• Continent
• Contact Person
• Content Type
• Applications
• Date Available
• Rights Holder
• Depositor
• Related Publications

Project Access Protocols

In previous versions of SayMore, you could type whatever you like in the "Access" field. Now, you have three options:

1.     You can choose from the FURCS or "REAP" Access Protocols, and SayMore will restrict your choices to the their closed vocabulary.

2.     You can set up a custom set of choices.

3.     Or you can still just let yourself type in whatever you want, as with version 2.

Project Documents

Add files that describe the project, how it was funded, etc.

Progress Charts

Progress has been moved from its own tab in Version 2 to live as a sub items under the new Project tab.

New Session Fields

• Interactivity
• Involvement
• Location country
• Location continent
• Location region
• Location address
• Sub-Genre
• Interactivity
• Planning Type
• Involvement
• Social Context

·         Task

·         New "Oral Translation Speaker" role

New Person Fields

• Nickname
• Code (for projects that wan to assign an alphanumeric id to each speaker)
• Ethnic Group

New Person Tab: Contributions

• The Contributions Tab automatically lists each session where the person is listed as a participant, and each file where they have been assigned a role under the file's Contributors tab.

Manual Segmenter Dialog

• Added a play button to individual segments
• Can now zoom in for finer control

Thanks

Sarah Moeller and Tim Gaved served as consultants and champions for this release.

What's New in Version 2

Version 1 of SayMore helped you get everything organized. Version 2 add many tools for helping you record, transcribe, convert, export, and archive. Optionally, you can also enlist native speakers to do time-aligned "oral annotation" steps, as used by the Basic Oral Language Documentation approach. In what follows, we summarize the changes made since Version 1:

You can now record new sessions directly in SayMore.

We plead with you to avoid using your laptop's built-in microphone; if you are willing to give up usefulness for future phonetic research, an OK USB headset can be had for US$35 or less in many countries. Note that the very popular Zoom H2's can also be plugged in and used as a microphone (in a lower quality mode).

All recording tools now feature a level meter which also indicates which device SayMore is recording from, to reduce the chances that you think you're recording from, say, a headset, but really the computer is listening to the laptop's built-in microphone.

·         SayMore now has an easy-to-use transcription tool, which looks like a table. Each row is a "segment". Before you can transcribe, you need to make these segments, and you can do that in one of 3 ways:

1) If you're doing BOLD, just set a native speaker up with the CarefulSpeech tool. Each chunk of speech he/she repeats becomes a segment.

2) You can use the Manual Segmenter

3) Try our experimental Auto-segmenter

·         In the Transcription tool, you can now choose what audio is played when the cursor is in the row. Original recording, careful recording or oral translation.

Oral Annotation

The Careful Speech and Oral Translation tools, which support the BOLD way of working, are designed to be super simple so that you can quickly train a native speaker to do these tasks:

• A single key (space bar) is all that is needed to do the whole task.
• If there are segments you don't want to annotate, you can mark them as "ignored".

File Format Handling

Many audio and video formats can now be converted to standard, future-friendly formats, right in SayMore.

Export

In addition to the ELAN file compatibility, Audacity import, and FLEx export, this version adds the following exports:

• Plain text
• CSV (comma-separated-value) for spreadsheets
• SFM (Toolbox)
• SRT Subtitle format

MetaData

As before, SayMore tries to figure out which recordings have gone through which stages of the workflow. If it gets it wrong, then you can use the new "status and Stages" tab can now manually take control of the stage for each session.

New features in version 1.5:

Built-in "Careful Speech" and "Oral Translation" tools for those doing BOLD (Basic Oral Language Documentation).

New features in version 1.3:

Built-in Transcription, stored using ELAN's file format, with export for FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx) interlinear.

New features in version 1.1:

Built-in packaging for REAP, SIL's Corporate Archive