verb
- (intransitive, cricket) To deliver googlies.
- (intransitive, cricket) To move as a ball in a googly.
- (transitive) To search for (something) on the Internet using the Google search engine.
Videos
Today I found an interesting tool.
I know Google Translate, it is a very useful tool. But today I searched in Google for "querying pronunciation" (my mother tongue is Brazilian Portuguese, and I'm improving my English).
If you search for "<anything> pronunciation", Google will show a box where you can listen the word, and while listening you will see lip/tongue movements, you can listen also in slow motion, and the best feature I see: a "Practice" button. Clicking, it will record your voice speaking the word and it will say if you said correctly, and if not, it will give clues like "it looks you said xxx instead" or "Good Job".
I want to ask what you think about this tool. Is it suggesting things correctly? Is it an ok tool to help on listening?
Google uses American pronunciation.
One of the most noticeable differences in pronunciation between AmE and BrE is that when words like hot, cop, cot, etc. are pronounced,
the o is pronounced as "ah" in AmE while it is pronounced as ɒ in BrE.
Here is a complete guide to learn British pronunciation (phonetic alphabet included) by BBC.
If you would like to hear how words are pronounced in British English, you may want to use the British Macmillan Dictionary. (But don't confuse yourself with the American Macmillan Dictionary, there is a small difference between their URLs.)
I can confirm Google uses American Pronunciation.
I searched for lambaste and the American pronunciation [lam'beist] was used where in British English it's [laem'baest] — hated it, really put my nose out of joint.
It seems to be a custom system developed by Google. Wikipedia lists it as the "Google pronunciation dictionary" scheme in its table of pronunciation respellings.
In particular, Google spells the SQUARE vowel as ehr, which is not used in any other system in Wikipedia's table.
I spent some time trying to find more information, but found nothing conclusive, not even in the Google speech-to-text or translation APIs.
I also found that the pronunciation respelling system described on Wikipedia doesn’t match Google’s results:
pronunciation
IPA:
prəˌnənsiˈeɪʃən
Converting the IPA spelling to Google’s system for representing phonemes:
pruh nuhnsi eishuhn
But in the actual Google search engine results:
pruh nuhn see ay shn
There is a noticeable difference in these results.
Did anyone else find more information?
I used to search "How to pronounce something" to practice pronunciation with Google AI (Speech to text?) as the below page. But, recently I can no longer see the "Speak it" icon there. Do you guys know how to use it again?
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9673327?hl=en
Do you use google as a verb? As in: I will google it.