SayMore 3 Beta
John Hatton
SayMore version 3 is now available as a beta test release. We would be grateful for anyone who can download it and give us feedback.
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.
Here are the full release notes for the work that has been done thus far (a few more features are coming soon).
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 Level Metdata
SayMore 3 adds a "Project" tab for the first time, along with these Project-level fields:
- Title
- Funding Project Title
- Description
- Vernacular Language
- Location/Address
- Region
- Country
- Continent
- Contact Person
- Content Type
- Applications
- Date Available
- Rights Holder
- Depositor
- Related Publications
- COMING SOON: Project-level documents
New Session Fields
- Interactivity
- Involvement
- Location country
- Location continent
- Location region
- Location address
- Sub-Genre
- Interactivity
- Planning Type
- Involvement
- Social Context
- Task
New Person Fields
- Nick Name
- Privacy Protection
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.
Standard 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.
Manual Segmenter Dialog
- Added a play button to individual segments
- COMING SOON: Zoom in/out
And since I didn’t do a good job of advertising Version 2, here are those release notes:
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.
John Hatton
Senior Software Engineer/Program Manager
Language Software Development
SIL International
Ken K
Hey John,
Thanks for the release announcement. The list of features you included in this release is impressive.
I just have one request in regards to this tool: could we please have a Linux version? The reason I'm asking is that the more essential tools we have in Linux, the less we have rely on Microsoft. My hope is we will eventually have a complete suite of linguistic and translation tools we can give to minority language groups with no strings attached.
That will be a giant step toward sustainable language programs which can function more or less autonomously.
Thanks for considering this request!
Cheers (& congratulations),
Ken
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