The flagship

Sentio

Hear it before you say it.

Sentio will teach you to hear, see and pronounce American English — vowels, then syllables, then words — and put your attempt beside the recording.

In development.

Sentio is at version 1.12.0 in testing here: the service and a first Android app, with the ladder as its home. Nothing is on Google Play and nothing is for sale; there is nothing on this page to install. It will be free, with a Pro upgrade coming.

Hear · See · Pronounce

HearTwo clips — the same word twice, or a pair. Same or different? Until ship and sheep sound apart, saying them is a coin toss.
SeeYour vowel drawn on the chart where it landed, beside where it should be, with the line between them.
PronounceHold the button and say it. Your attempt plays beside the recording — a real person wherever one said it. Loudness and pitch, the model’s and yours, drawn one above the other.

In the app today 1.5.0 · in testing

The ladderSeven rungs: a vowel, onset, coda, one syllable, two, three, four or more.
Fair comparisons: levelledModel and attempt each scaled to their own loudness and trimmed the same way.
Aligned on the vowelBoth lined up on the vowel and stretched to one width; what is around it is shown, not compared.
Real voicesA real person says many of the words — 2,088 recordings over 744 words — before any synthetic voice.
AnalyserYour microphone, live, on the phone: spectrum, spectrogram, pitch, and your vowel as a dot on the chart.
Vowel generatorA vowel made from its formants at the reference values; drag it on the chart and hear it change.

Vowels, then syllables, then words

Pronunciation is usually taught as a list of sounds and then, suddenly, as sentences. Sentio climbs one step at a time.

7four syllables or morefind the strong oneˌɪ·ˈmi·di·ət·li immediately331
6three syllablesstrong, weaker, weakə·ˈɡɹi·mənt agreement675
5two syllablesone strong, one weakbɪ·ˈliv believe1,296
4one whole syllableboth sides pullingˈbit beat1,113
3the vowel, then a consonanthold it, then leaveˈit from seat290
2a consonant, then the vowelstart, and still arriveˈbi from bead300
1a vowelthe place, aloneˈi from heed22

Vowels, then syllables, then words — one new thing per step. Each rung is the one below plus exactly one thing, and only that thing is judged harder. The examples follow one vowel, i, all the way up; the number is how many things there are to say on that rung in Sentio’s material today. The amber rungs are where most courses stop and where English starts: letting a weak syllable be weak, and finding the strong one.

What “see” means here

A vowel is two resonances of the mouth. Sentio measures yours and draws it on the same chart its reference is drawn on.

deed ˈdid
tongue high and forward
had ˈhæd
the mouth opens: F1 rises
not ˈnɑt
the tongue goes back: F2 falls

The bright bands are the formants, and they are the vowel. F1 rises as the mouth opens (deed → had); F2 falls as the tongue moves back (had → not). Above each picture, the waveform; the dashed lines mark the vowel’s own F1 and F2, measured by the laboratory’s tracker. One speaker, rms (a man), each word cut from a sentence he read. Read speech, CMU ARCTIC.

The chart is a map of the mouth. Up is the tongue high, down the mouth open (F1); left is the tongue forward, right back (F2). Each ring is one standard deviation around where four American voices put that vowel; the dashed ring is the schwa, which has no place of its own. Centers in the hertz of an average mouth — nobody is judged in these numbers, only in their own.

The full reference, interactive, is the vowel map — the same data the program judges with, so it is the honest preview of what the app will teach from.

What the judgment is, and what it is not

A vowel class, not a letter. Which vowel a word has is decided by the word, never by how it is spelled — hot and car are written with the same symbol in a machine dictionary and are two different vowels. Pooling them aims a learner at a vowel nobody says; it happened to this family's own chart once, and a test now guards against it.
Nobody is measured in hertz. A child, a woman and a man say the same vowel hundreds of hertz apart and none of them is wrong. Every comparison is made inside the speaker's own range, so a small mouth is not a mistake.
The target moves with the neighbors. A vowel after a k or before a dark l genuinely sits somewhere else, and the reference is moved there before anything is judged. Without that, a learner is charged for the program's own error — in one measurement, most of an advanced learner's whole allowance.
An answer you can act on. What was wrong and what to change with your mouth, in words — not a score out of a hundred, and never a verdict about your accent.

Five screens

In the app at phone size, and in a browser window on our own computer.

PracticeThe ladder: pick a rung and a vowel, hear the model, say it, see where it landed.
WordsThe bench: narrow by vowel, onset, coda, rung, syllables or spelling.
Minimal pairsTwelve confusions of American English, every pair for each, and a quiz.
Same or differentThe ear before the mouth: two clips, say which, with a running score.
The chartThe whole reference: tap a vowel to hear it and see the route a diphthong takes.

Sentio and the book

Sentio teaches in the order the NeuroPhonetics book teaches. A book is coming that explains the method. Ask to hear when it’s out.

What belongs to the others

Sentio is the only one in the family that teaches. It holds the levels, the reference and the per-sound judgment, and the other programs deliberately do not: Antiphon compares you with the one speaker in the clip you chose and holds no opinion about what a vowel ought to be; Phonema settles the notation the whole family writes; Mimesis and Lectio bring in the words. Nothing is duplicated between them, which is why each is small enough to be finished.

Your data

No account, no ads, no tracking — the same rule as the rest of the family, and the same rule for the service: it takes a recording, answers, and forgets. Nothing about what a person practiced is meant to rest on a server; your own vowel space, your progress, your attempts and your streak stay on your phone, copied only to your own devices or your own Drive when you choose. The reference recordings and their formants are ours, and the service only reads them.

Where it is

Sentio for Android, in development: version 1.12.0 is in testing here.
The name and the package are settled: com.neurophonetics.sentio

Google Play — not published yet

Questions, or an interest in trying it early:

The rest of the family

Separate programs, each doing one job. None of them needs another — they simply go well together.

Redeem TimeNotice. Limit. Redeem.
MimesisListen. Click. Keep.
PhonemaSee every word, as it’s really said.
LectioRead. Click. Remember.
AntiphonHear it. Echo it. Speak it.
Semantica Coming soonFind the word that fits.
Pragma Coming soonCatch the hint. Answer in kind.