question

I have two children, one each side of literacy. I was dissatisfied with all the flashcard apps I saw. They just displayed words randomly. So I wrote my own that would bias the frequency for each word based on how good they were at recognizing it. The downside of those web-apps was that they had to be played side-by-side with the parent, so that it could work out if you said them correctly. Today I ported this to The Echo. It has the potential to get past this downside because it can recognize what the child says. http://youtu.be/D-sgf4DUOKY [b]Lessons Learned[/b]: * Language recognition still has some ways to go. There were several times when my child got the answer right, but The Echo heard it wrong. That lead to no small amount of frustration. * I had an alphabet app, but I couldn't port that. The Echo doesn't do very well at recognizing letters when read out. * Homophones present a problem. The Greek Mythology word list has all the Greek letters on it. When she tried to identify the letter "nu", The Echo heard it as "new". (This is an example where passing to the application all the matching utterances and their confidence level, as I requested in Feature Requests) would be useful. * Hard to work with cards with no formatting. For this app, I wanted the one, single word to be front and center in the companion app. Since there is no styling options (as frequently brought up in Feature Requests) I had to trick around and make the word the title. * The display font used in the companion app doesn't have all unicode letters. My Norse Mythology list has the Eldar Futhark runes on it. These display as tofu (small little squares) in the companion app. * Being able to stream little "whoopie" sounds (as requested, again, in Feature Requests) would make the app more compelling * On the plus side, my daughter found it easy to use and was able to work it out with almost no coaching.