True Phonetic Rhyming
There have been lots of changes lately to Rhymebrain.com. In the past few months, I have added the German, French, and Spanish languages.
RhymeBrain is one of only three rhyming dictionaries that I know about that do rhyming in the phonetic space. One is B-rhymes, which give delightfully different results from Rhymebrain. The other is the excellent German language rhyming dictionary, http://www.echtreim.de. Before this year, I was using the sounds of only the english language to do rhyming. Technically, I was first converting the words that you enter into ARPABET (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpabet), and then looking for words with similar ARPABET encodings. I describe this technique in my blog on computer programming.
Now, using new techniques in machine learning, which are only a few years old, I am able to convert the words that you enter into the International Phonetic Alphabet. If you open up a dictionary and look at the pronunciation, the phonetic alphabet is the strange symbols that they use to show you how to pronounce a word. For example: /fəˈnɛtɪks/.
You can now see exactly how rhymebrain.com thinks a word is pronounced using the pronunciation tool.
The international Phonetic Alphabet is designed to show how to pronounce any of the world’s languages. And so, it is now possible for rhymebrain to do true phonetic rhymes any language. So far, I have added only a few, but I hope to add more in the future. It is challenging, because I don’t know any other languages. I took some French in high school, which is a big help, but other than that I have no idea if the rhymes are correct. That is why I am rolling out features very slowly.
I am constantly tweaking how rhymes are calculated. Since I have spent so much time learning about phonetics, I have made the rules more consistent. For example, a B sounds similar to a D, and so they are considered equivalent for near rhymes. These rules apply no matter what language you are speaking. In a sense, rhyming is a universal language that transcends international boundaries.
Advertising
The other big change is that there is now advertising on rhymebrain.com. I hate Internet ads, and I encourage you to block them using AdBlock Plus (search on Google for this if you don’t know what it is). However, I must put ads on the site. The reason is because I love to spend time on my hobby, creating rhymebrain.com, but it is easier to justify this time away from my family if it is producing some revenue. Currently the ads, from the 60,0000 weekly visitors, produce about $130 per week. So far, I have purchased some additional computer RAM with this money, which allowed me to process and add the additional languages.