WordAloud -- Read Aloud English Words

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News

• 10/15/2005: Current version. Changes include:

  1. Fixed a bug that sometimes does show Cambridge difinitions
  2. Added auto-startup option
  

• 10/01/2005: Changes include:

  1. Added Difinition from Cambridge Dictionary, which shows whether a noun
     is countable or uncountable, besides other things. I found that very useful.
  

• 08/22/2005: version 0.2 released. Changes include:

  1. made the edit_out readonly. 
  2. changed the tray-icon behaviour to left click to open and right click for menu.
  3. switched the position of Hide and About to make it more nature.
  4. set the word list highlight to the current word after speaking it.
  5. improved the hotkey handling: 
       a. removed the leading and trailing spaces. 
       b. clear the old clipboard content.
  

• 08/19/2005: First release version 0.1 to sourceforge.

The programming language is Autoit script language version 3 (http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/). then it is compiled to a Windows executable. Other than the webster.com website, this program does not depend on any external other libraries or resources.

WordAloud is particular interesting to users whose native language is not English. They will find this very useful. The advantage of this project over using web browser is that it is much faster in speed ,because it does not load all the graphics and flash advertisements. This is especially true for people with slow internet connection. It also saves a history of the words the user has used so that the user can go back and go over those words again later.

WordAloud is fully functioning now. It runs on Windows 2000, XP, and Windows 98, and possibly Windows 95 and NT.

At this moment, the final program is just one exe file. I could easily build an installation package people really prefer it.

Download

1. Can I use hotkey to activate WordAloud?
   Yes. The build-in hotkey is "Ctrl-`", which is hold Ctrl key and press "`" key, the key left to key "1". When you select a word in your application (let's say webbrowser or MS word) and hit the hot key, WordAloud will automatically pronounce that word. At this moment, the hot-key is not configurable. I am not aware of any application using this hot-key. However, if it does conflict with any other applications, later release may set this to a configuable key.

Thanks to Sourceforge for provoding the hosting.