# tscriting: the backstory of the @/tscriter tool

earlier this year i had this crazy idea that i wanted to learn german. i looked around and found smartergerman.com which would allow you to learn german online alone. it was quite fine for a while but i think having access to a private teacher is much better. so i eventually stopped using the site in favor of the teacher, well, at least as long as my job was reimbursing the lessons.

anyways, as i was lurking on a site i've seen that its owner was looking for someone to replicate a tool he has seen online. this tool basically plays you a video, and then you have to enter what you heard. you can keep replaying the audio/video until you got your sentence right. you can also ask for some hints too. the guy tried to contact the owners of the tool he found, but they weren't responsive at all, hence he looked someone to replicate it. he wanted to play around with such a tool and if people like it, he might even add it to his site. i thought that would be a fun tool to work on.

so i volunteered that i can give a stab at it. he even wanted to pay but i refused since i didn't want to deal with the taxes. besides, what i had in mind was quite trivial, i wouldn't really ask money for this.

for this project i came up with the name "tscriter". i meant it as a play on the phrase "transcription tester". i created a github project for it and started implementing it. then we iterated for a while. i implemented some features, and then he gave me feedback. working like this was quite nice. i even added some css after all the prompting. i think it's more motivating if you are creating something for someone rather than when you are creating something for yourself.

however as time went on and he played with my tool, he realized that he wanted to have something different. he wanted the tool to allow entering the full text, and then count the mistakes like in a real dictation. i thought this is also interesting but it should be a separate tool rather than changing what i was working on at the moment. i think someone else also volunteered to him and that someone else did the dictation tool for him so we sort of lost touch after this. but he did upload my tool and asked their users to test it. the results were mixed: some people liked it, some people not. after seeing that, i guess he didn't go forward with adding my tool to his site.

you can check out the tool at @/tscriter. we were testing it with this smartergerman text: @/tscriter#smartergerman.txt

i can no longer see any reference to this tool on his site so i thought i'll delete the project from github and put it on my blog to let it rest in peace.

before i stopped working on the project, i've added a few more features. all he wanted is just audio playback + a text entry box. but eventually i figured out i can easily play back youtube videos, and i can easily fetch the youtube subtitles too. so i added a feature where you point the tool at a youtube video, it extracts the subtitles and let's you type that.

however the problem is that there are very few videos with good quality subtitles. and with google deprecating apis all the time, i'd expect it won't work for long anyways. so i still retain the capability to define custom text. one can either host the texts or just paste them directly into the tool.

overall, it think it was a nice little project, i learned a lot. totally would do it again! try it out and let me know what you think about it!

published on 2020-10-18

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