Tools — teacher's guide

The student arrives at a page with four cards and selects one of them. Each tool is a single screen with one button: the student performs one action, gets the result immediately, and can copy or download it.

How it works

The tools are located at /tools, and the student must be logged in. Each card opens its own page.

In Image to text, the student clicks Select image and uploads an image from their computer or phone. The text is returned in an editable field, with Copy text below it.

In Text to speech, the student pastes text, selects a voice, and clicks Create audio file. The audio starts playing while it is being generated, and afterwards, a Download audio file button appears below.

In Speech to text, the student clicks Record audio, speaks, and clicks Stop recording. The browser will ask for microphone access the first time. The text appears in a field where the student can make corrections before copying it.

In Audio recorder, the student clicks Record audio and then Stop and download. The recording is created in the browser and downloaded directly to the device.

The tools

• Audio recorder — simple audio recording downloaded as a file. Useful when the student needs to submit spoken work or listen to themselves reading.
• Image to text — extracts the text from an image, verbatim. Useful for a page in a book, a letter from NAV, or a paper handout.
• Text to speech — reads text aloud with a natural voice and generates an audio file. Useful when the student wants to listen to text they have written themselves, or when you need audio for an assignment.
• Speech to text — transcribes what the student says. Useful for students who speak better than they write, and as a first draft before writing.

Who it is suitable for

The tools are suitable for all levels and do not require the student to be able to write. An A1-level student can take a photo of a worksheet and extract the text, or speak a sentence and see it written down.

Be clear about what they do not do: they do not correct, translate, or explain. Image to text reproduces exactly what is in the image, errors and all. The result remains on the screen until the student copies or downloads it. If the text needs to be saved and read with word definitions, it belongs in Read from image, which is a reading feature and not part of Tools.

Suggestions for working with Tools

1. Take a photo of a paper worksheet you are handing out, run it through Image to text, and paste the text wherever you need it — as a writing task in Write or as raw material in the Teacher Assistant.
2. Create audio for a text the class is working on: paste the text into Text to speech, choose a voice, download the audio file, and share it with the group. Students who do not have time to finish reading in class can listen to the text at home.
3. Have students read the same text into the Audio recorder, listen to themselves, and record again. Two recordings taken a week apart show tangible progress.
4. Use Speech to text as preparation for writing: the student speaks orally, sees what was actually captured, and self-corrects before pasting the text into Write.
5. Demonstrate the tools on a big screen once. They are self-explanatory, but students rarely discover them on their own.
6. Use them in your own lesson prep: photographing a book page and getting the digital text takes seconds, saving you from typing it out manually.

Good to know

• Time spent in Tools counts as tool time, not learning time. On Progress, it is displayed in its own section, separate from learning time, and does not count toward daily streaks. The tools perform a task for the student — they are not practice exercises.
• The Audio Recorder stays in the browser. The recording is created locally and downloaded to the device without being sent to Språki. Speech to text, on the other hand, sends the audio to the service to be transcribed.
• Text to speech reads Norwegian and features eight voices. Kore is the default; in addition, the student can choose Puck, Charon, Aoede, Leda, Zephyr, Fenrir, or Orus. Each audio file is generated from up to 5,000 characters — split long texts into paragraphs.
• Image to text supports common image formats. JPG, PNG, WEBP, and HEIC from iPhone work, up to 10 MB. Good lighting and a straight-on shot from above give the best results.

See also

• Which tools are available in Språki? — a brief overview written for students
• If the microphone does not work — troubleshooting guide for recording
• Read from image — when text from an image needs to be saved and read, not just copied