Preparing for the Readalongs workshop at ICLDC

To participate in this workshop, you’ll need a computer (a desktop or laptop), and a modern web browser like Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge. We don’t recommend using a tablet or phone to make readalongs. (You can view the resulting readalongs on a tablet or phone, but we don’t recommend making them on a tablet or phone.)

In addition, we recommend coming prepared with a story. Turning a story into a readalong requires two files:

The written text of the story, in a digital text format like .TXT. (Just having a photo of the story isn’t enough, it has to be a text document of some sort.)
A digital audio recording of someone reading the story aloud, in .WAV or .MP3 format. (The less background noise, the better! If there’s a lot going on in the background ― wind or machinery or other people talking ― the software often can’t process it.)

If you don’t have these, you can still attend the workshop; we’ll be showing you how to write/record a quick story directly in our software, just to try it out.

What kind of stories work best?

Shorter stories (like less than 5 minutes long) are more likely to align well, although this software has been successfully used for stories as long as 20 minutes.

It’s important that the audio and the text correspond exactly (that there are no extraneous words in the text, no mis-speakings in the audio, etc.), and that the audio is relatively free of background noise.

Also, the software generally cannot handle numbers and symbols. It can guess that “S” sounds like “sssss” because that’s the same for a lot of languages, but it will never manage to guess that “$634” sounds like “seiscientos treinta y cuatro dolares”, because that’s different in every language.

For more on the strengths and weaknesses of the software, and explanations why, you can read more in Troubleshooting

What kind of format does the text have to be in?

The text has to be in a digital text format, such as plain text .TXT. For a richer format like Word .DOC, you can copy/paste the text from your document into our software. (But note you’ll lose any formatting that you had. If you had bold or italics or colors, those will be lost.)

There are some additional requirements on how special characters and fonts are handled, like that the document has to be encoded in Unicode. If you don’t know what that means, go to this page to learn more.

Also, it can’t just be a photo or video of the document, it has to be something with copy/paste-able text. (If you can’t easily get the text out of your document, nor will our software be able to!)

What kind of format does the audio have to be in?

Audio recordings in .WAV and .MP3 will definitely work. Other formats might work but it depends on your operating system and browser.

What languages does the software work with?

For many languages, the software should work right out of the box. Even if your language isn’t one of the 30-some languages that are explicitly listed, you can keep the default language option of Undetermined (und) and it can usually make good guesses about what each letter sounds like. (This even works for many non-Roman alphabets like Cyrillic or Arabic or Syllabics.)

However, it will generally guess based on “typical” pronunciations of those letters across lots of languages. If your language uses familiar letters but in unfamiliar ways, the software may have trouble guessing.

For more information on what kinds of languages do or don’t work well with the automatic guessing, go to the Languages page.