ncubeeight

I have a colleague who is trying to study her mother's native language (she is second generation non-resident Taiwanese) and wants to have a tool for transliterating her parents' dialog into English with learning highlights for study as flash cards. This is beyond what Duolingo, Apple Translate and Google Translate were designed to do. It seemed this could be built using several existing tools. We could ask Duolingo, Apple or Google to build it for us. But our use case here might be too niche to make sense to the general population of language learners who use those other tools.  Right now she uses a recorder, then ends one step in the process. Then she would look up different words in a dictionary phonetically to find the Chinese character she was hoping to learn. Then she saves those words in a list and practices those terms in her own context. I’ve done this too. I also study Chinese characters for fun. (Han characters, called 漢字 (Kanji) in Japanese, are foundational concept...

I have worked with multiple search engine companies through the last three decades. It was what my generation’s task was after the personal computer boom that was defined by the work of my father’s generation. (He was a systems engineer for IBM through the transition from “Big Iron” mainframe computers to desktop computers.) So over the years I’ve seen some fascinating technology advancements in how we author the web as web content creators, how we index it and serve it via search engines, and how we scale accessibility for original creative content bringing new audiences to it through web portals, apps and content aggregation tools.  Recently, I’ve been seeing a transition portended over a decade ago in a panel discussion about new advancements in spam filtering and search engine optimization. The panel featured the legendary Matt Cutts from Google who was their “head of web spam”. In that decade, anchor-text ranking that had defined the early “Page Rank” sorting on the sear...