BlingSpeller
BlingSpeller
Bling Speller is a bilingual spelling assistant (for speakers of English and Mandarin Chinese),
designed to help you find words that you “half know”.
Available for macOS, iOS and Windows
BlingSpeller
Do you speak English and Chinese? Or are you learning one of these languages along with the other? Do you find it difficult to find the spelling of some words in English or pinyin, because spelling is challenging for you, or because you aren’t always sure what all the parts of a word should be? In your country or region, is it difficult to get a virtual assistant to find and spell out English or Chinese words?
BlingSpeller is small and fast, but it is “old school” – it is designed to help you find words that are “on the tip of your tongue” because you half remember something about them; it doesn’t use AI to tell you what to say and it doesn’t learn from you. Its translations are intended to be a simple way to help you – as a bilingual speaker of English and Chinese – check that you’ve got the word you wanted.
Simple. Offline. Educational.
The app
works offline and does not transmit or receive data from the internet.
It is
designed to help writers in educational settings by suggesting words according
to a flexible searching system.
Flexible Letter/Character Searching
- Search for words starting with, containing or ending with specific combinations of letters/characters;
- Search for up to three alternatives in each box (e.g. f/ph will find words with either
or in the spelling).
Voice Search
- Use your device’s built-in speech recognition functionality (iOS and macOS only) to find words you say out loud;
- For English, as well as the word your device “heard”, you will see a list of similar sounding words.
Chinese/English Bilinguals
- Search for English words or Mandarin Chinese words using pinyin (with or without tone numbers) or hanzi;
- See straightforward English or Chinese translations of the words, along with pinyin, Chinese characters and definitions.
Listen
- Hear the words read out using synthesized speech (using simple robotic voices, not requiring networking or AI);
- Listen to each letter spelled out (English) or to each part of a Chinese character (left to right, top to bottom, etc.).
Acknowledgements
Artwork by Cindy
Chinese translations of website and store listing information by D.L.
Full Stack App Development by Stephen Jeaco
The app is free to download and free to use and runs on macOS, iOS and Windows.
The main dictionary used to power the suggestions is CC-EDICT, a Creative Commons resource. The instructions for how to write Chinese characters (spoken out loud in the app) are derived from skishore’s makemeahanzi project.
Files containing the refactored English and Chinese data are available under the same licenses inside the app’s package.
More free apps from Stephen Jeaco are available from:
Get BlingSpeller
Available for macOS, iOS and Windows
