In Scratch, I have seen many wonderful animations, but I have been too lazy to listen to them. Many Scratch animations use voice acting without use of subtitles, making the content of these animations not fully understandable by people who can't have sound on, people who personally do not like to have sound on (such as me), and most importantly deaf people. Also, I doubt that most animations (of the type I have just described) have remixes with subtitles or have a feature to display subtitles. I also doubt that there are shops that make remixes-with-subtitles as one of their services, and if so then it would be too much of a hassle. In order to fix this great problem, I suggest a Scratch voice-to-text engine / subtitles. This feature would be enabled by pressing a button near the green flag in a project. Once enabled, any sounds that are emitted by the project are translated by Scratch into text/subtitles on the bottom of the screen. This subtitles/voice-to-text engine would be similar to the one used by YouTube (but hopefully better).

Note that I have no idea if this is a duplicate post or not, and I do not wish to use custom search engines or google.

I understand that this suggestion maybe difficult to implement, but remember, Scratch is supposed to be for everybody, so Scratch should have features that allow deaf people to use it.

Also, experimental versions of Scratch contain features like what I have suggested, so maybe this suggestion wouldn't be that hard to implement.

Another thing: if this subtitle engine misinterpreted words, it would not, under any circumstance, display inappropriate words. Also, once a user enables the subtitles, they get a popup telling them that the subtitles could be highly inaccurate, and that they should not assume anything.

Supporters:

• @LionHeart70
• @Pusheen_Lover_1234
• @Carriage
• @Botcho_Otkho
• @ComicWorldBros
  

Semi-Supporters:
No one yet

Undecided Supporters ** :
No one yet

Non-Supporters:

• @FancyFoxy
• @Charles12310
• @Galleigo
• @duckboycool
• @Randomness-TV
• @braxbroscratcher
  

Unknown Supporters * :

• @Sheep_maker
• @footsocktoe
• @DownsGameClub
  

*Unknown supporters are users that discussed this suggestion, but did not give enough feedback for me to group them into one of the other support categories.

** Undecided supporters are users who have discussed this suggestion deeply, by giving out lots of opinions about the pros and cons or this suggestion, but did not choose a side or did not make the side they chose clear.

Voice-to-text is not something so simple you can do it with an “engine”. It's a major piece of software. Dragon Naturally Speaking is a commercial version. There are also websites that will do the voice to text conversion for you.

footsocktoe wrote:

Voice-to-text is not something so simple you can do it with an “engine”. It's a major piece of software. Dragon Naturally Speaking is a commercial version. There are also websites that will do the voice to text conversion for you.

Thanks for telling me.

Support, but you could use the site fromtexttospeech.com for text to speech, it doesn't sound incredibly weird and it's free.
Subtitles would be good to use, but how would it be added exactly? Kinda like subtitles on YouTube? (Also, another reason people might want subtitles on is, maybe for people like me who don't understand quite what it's saying or just like having subtitles on, or maybe they speak another language or just don't understand English) However, they probably should be better than YT subtitles.. seriously, some YT subtitles are ridiculous.
However, it shouldn't be for all projects. Some things don't have audio and therefore don't need subtitles. And some people may just wish for there to not be subtitles.

The reason YouTube subtitles can be ridiculous is because voice-to-text is incredibly DIFFICULT to do. Scratch is never going to add that. No matter how much support it gets.

By the way, what kind of results have you gotten at fromtexttospeech.com? How accurate do you estimate them to be? I might be interested if it's free. And why do they call it fromtexttospeech if it's a speechtotext site?

footsocktoe wrote:

The reason YouTube subtitles can be ridiculous is because voice-to-text is incredibly DIFFICULT to do. Scratch is never going to add that. No matter how much support it gets.

By the way, what kind of results have you gotten at fromtexttospeech.com? How accurate do you estimate them to be? I might be interested if it's free. And why do they call it fromtexttospeech if it's a speechtotext site?

Oh, fromtexttospeech is actually just a site that you type in something and then it turns it to speech. I got it the other way around. Whoops
And yes, voice to text can be very difficult. And that's how it gets so ridiculous..

There are Scratch extensions (Scratch 2.0 example, Scratch 3.0 example) that can do this, so it's not impossible.

red_king_cyclops wrote:

In Scratch, I have seen many wonderful animations, but I have been too lazy to listen to them. Many Scratch animations use voice acting without use of subtitles, making the content of these animations not fully understandable by people who can't have sound on, people who personally do not like to have sound on (such as me), and most importantly deaf people. Also, I doubt that most animations (of the type I have just described) have remixes with subtitles or have a feature to display subtitles. I also doubt that there are shops that make remixes-with-subtitles as one of their services, and if so then it would be too much of a hassle. In order to fix this great problem, I suggest a Scratch voice-to-text engine / subtitles. This feature would be enabled by pressing a button near the green flag in a project. Once enabled, any sounds that are emitted by the project are translated by Scratch into text/subtitles on the bottom of the screen. This subtitles/voice-to-text engine would be similar to the one used by YouTube.

Note that I have no idea if this is a duplicate post or not, and I do not wish to use custom search engines or google.

Supporters:
No one yet

Semi-Supporters:
No one yet

Undecided Supporters ** :
No one yet

Non-Supporters:
No one yet

Unknown Supporters * :
No one yet

*Unknown supporters are users that discussed this suggestion, but did not give enough feedback for me to group them into one of the other support categories.

** Undecided supporters are users who have discussed this suggestion deeply, by giving out lots of opinions about the pros and cons or this suggestion, but did not choose a side or did not make the side they chose clear.

I really agree that we should have this! I know a lot of deaf or hard of hearing people who get upset because they can not understand people when they are talking. I know that it would be difficult to make this, so I believe if you're going to put speech in your projects about a serious problem then add subtitles too for these people!

I don't support. Subtitles really only work for people who talk smoothly. And when many Scratch users don't really use very good sound quality and voice acting for their animations, you can get some… really weird subtitles. Also, why wouldn't you like to have your sound on? It's kinda one of those things that you need a component of to work.

Pusheen_Lover_1234 wrote:

I really agree that we should have this! I know a lot of deaf or hard of hearing people who get upset because they can not understand people when they are talking. I know that it would be difficult to make this, so I believe if you're going to put speech in your projects about a serious problem then add subtitles too for these people!

How can you add subtitles to a project that isn't even yours? The majority of the website is text, and generically, projects are going to be games. Therefore, they should read the instructions to see what to do.

Sheep_maker wrote:

There are Scratch extensions (Scratch 2.0 example, Scratch 3.0 example) that can do this, so it's not impossible.

Looks to me like those are for text to speech, not speech to text. Am I wrong?

footsocktoe wrote:

Sheep_maker wrote:

There are Scratch extensions (Scratch 2.0 example, Scratch 3.0 example) that can do this, so it's not impossible.

Looks to me like those are for text to speech, not speech to text. Am I wrong?

Both examples include both text to speech and speech to text.
For speech to text the Scratch 2.0 example has

start recognition::extension
(result::extension)

The Scratch 3.0 example has

when I hear [scratch]::hat #FF6680
(speech::#FF6680)

Sheep_maker wrote:

footsocktoe wrote:

Sheep_maker wrote:

There are Scratch extensions (Scratch 2.0 example, Scratch 3.0 example) that can do this, so it's not impossible.

Looks to me like those are for text to speech, not speech to text. Am I wrong?

Both examples include both text to speech and speech to text.
For speech to text the Scratch 2.0 example has

start recognition::extension
(result::extension)

The Scratch 3.0 example has

when I hear [scratch]::hat #FF6680
(speech::#FF6680)

Cool! Extensions are something I have not learned how to do yet, so that is a good reason to learn now.

There is an experimental extension on ScratchX,view it here.
However,support.

talk [] with [male v] voice::#B3390A
last speech::#B3390A reporter

bump

EDIT: Actually, they just added a test for it…

Hey! Carry here. I’m 11, a girl, and I love making animations. Don’t forget to visit my profile! See you soon!

Scratch! :: #00EDFF
Imagine, :: #FF0000
Program, :: #FFFF00
Share :: #00E300

No Support. Something like this is too complicated, and the system might pick up something different.

Like when you say, “I LIKE YOU!”, it may come out as, “I LIE CUE!” See what I mean?

The worst thing is when you say something clean but then comes out inappropriate in text (I can't demonstrate).

Charles12310 wrote:

No Support. Something like this is too complicated, and the system might pick up something different.

Like when you say, “I LIKE YOU!”, it may come out as, “I LIE CUE!” See what I mean?

The worst thing is when you say something clean but then comes out inappropriate in text (I can't demonstrate).

Yes, and this can also cause misinterpretations, which lead to flame wars, which leads to hate, which leads to everyone getting banned.

60 second rule, why have you decided to do this to me?

Er…

Well, automatically converting words to subtitles is a very difficult task.

And other places that try this, such as YouTube, often make… *cough* “inaccurate” conversions.

((╯°□°)–︻╦╤─ – – – :: sensing) :: pen cap

Galleigo wrote:

Er…

Well, automatically converting words to subtitles is a very difficult task.

And other places that try this, such as YouTube, often make… *cough* “inaccurate” conversions.

And YouTube has a much larger budget for this sort of thing.