KidTalk 2.0

Welcome to KidTalk 2.0!

Thank you for being a part of KidTalk Language Scrapbooking for Science. Maybe you’ve been with us since KidTalk Beta, in which case thank you for sticking with us through our citizen science journey! If this is your first time hearing about KidTalk, you’re joining us at a great time as we’ve just released some major updates and improvements to our app. In this blog post, we’ll go over the changes that were released in our update on 9/2/2020. Those of you who are new to KidTalk might find our Getting Started page helpful when you’re using the app for the first time.

We made some changes to the recording process to make it more user-friendly. You can now save a recording immediately without playing it back. If you want to crop a recording, you’ll still need to start playing it back in order to access this feature. We hope this will make it easier for busy parents to create and save recordings.

You’ll notice the names on the recording buttons have changed, too. The “Record” button now says “Spontaneous” and the “Start a Conversation” button is called “Prompt me.” “Extract audio” is now called “Upload.”

We want you to have more creative control over your scrapbook, so you now have the option to add icons to your recordings. Add these small pictures by pressing the “+” button and then typing a search term (such as “ball”). A selection of images will appear. Click on one or more images to add them.

When you go to you language scrapbook, you’ll see that the recordings are now in three different colors: dark blue, light blue, and orange. Conversations about a picture are dark blue and the picture appears on the scrapbook entry. Spontaneous recordings and recordings you uploaded from a video are light blue. The orange recordings are what we call snippets — these are short recordings that you clip from a longer recording.

There are two ways you can make a snippet. One option is to crop a recording right after making the recording. The second option is to select a recording from your scrapbook and click “make snippet.” This will bring you to a page where you can crop a snippet from the larger recording, tag the speakers in the snippet, crop the snippet, add an optional icon. We encourage you to transcribe your snippets, but you do not have to.

We’ve also increased the flexibility you have when searching and editing your scrapbook entries. When you click on a recording, you’ll be able to add, change, and remove comments, labels, icons, and tagged speakers. You can change the date of a recording you uploaded.

You’ll also notice many bug fixes. Thank you for your patience while we work on these! We’ve fixed the major bug some of you reported with recordings getting stuck in processing or not getting saved to your scrapbook. We fixed a bug in Say What? that caused recordings to stop playing. Please contact us if you notice any bugs or have other feedback on the app! We’re always happy to hear from KidTalk participants what you like about us and what we can do better.