Usually I like to test out apps and digital tools with students before blogging about them but I am traveling this week. I spent some time myself testing it and I am absolutely entranced.
What is Noisy Book?
Noisy is a free iOS app (needs iOS 13 or later and runs great on iPhone 7 or above, or an iPad 3 or above) . The user begins reading any kind of text whether it is a book or their own piece of writing and the app brings the story to life with sound effects. Other features include a transcription that forms as you speak aloud, the option to save the transcription as a PDF and the app even creates quiz questions based on the actors, animals, locations, moods and more. Incredible!This app uses off-line speech recognition and no data ever leaves your device. It is rated for ages 4+.
It supports 7 languages" English, Chinese, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese Spanish, and Turkish.
You don't have to sign into an account to use Noisy Book. Just pick up any text or use your imagination to make a story come to life! Wouldn't students LOVE using this at the publishing stage to read a story they wrote?
Check out my example:
Are There In-App Purchases?
All of the features mentioned above are available for free. There is one in app purchase ($0.99) which will let you save more than one story.Transcriptions
It is important to point out that the transcriptions do not include proper capitalization and punctuation. If this irritates the inner teacher in you š then you could always consider having students make editing marks on their stories in a separate app since you can save the transcription as a PDF or just take a screenshot. I'm thinking that this app might be more appropriate for read alouds and fluency practice anyway.☝️Tip
It took me a couple of attempts (before I read the app description) to figure out that you have to say "The End" when you want to finish recording. This is when the questions will pop up for the user to answer. I found that most of the questions were fairly basic but I did like this one pictures below that popped up for the story I wrote about my dog, Rusty. The text talks about the setting being in the woods but the app gives the synonym, forest, as the answer choice.You can always pause recording your story by tapping anywhere on the screen.
Right now they have 600+ sounds and are working on adding more. I highly recommend trying out Noisy Book!