Forvo is (sort of) hiring (again)

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Good news! Forvo is growing so healthy that we have decided to bring more people to our team.

- Do you love languages?
- Do you speak English and Spanish?
- Could you spend some time from your home helping us with the quality of our dictionary?

We have an offer for you! :)

Please contact for more information: info (at) forvo (dot) com.

Our journey to translate Forvo into 39 languages

With the recents releases of Croatian, Hebrew, Armenian, Latvian and Norwegian, Forvo is now translated into 39 languages. We are very proud of this achievement, and we wanted to thanks again the team of volunteers who is helping us to grow this way.

We sadly announced that we are going to stop translations as new languages are smaller and harder to find volunteers in, and in the end… how many websites in the word are translated into 39 languages? I guess not so many, if so a couple of hundreds and Forvo is quite small in resources compared with Microsoft or Wikipedia.

But this doesn’t mean we have finished Forvo. More fun very soon.

Forvo API announcements

Forvo API community is growing up to 2,000 developers so we would like to share with you some recent news about it.

- Commercial release: Forvo pronunciation API can be used in projects with a clear commercial intention that’s why we have created a bunch of plans that could meet your needs. If you need anything more customized we can also have a talk about it.

- Panel improvement: We have added some improvements to your API panel so now you can see your requests divided by type of request: json, XML, etc. Audio requests also have been added and they are shown to give you a better perspective of how your application is going.

- Second request limits: For certain plans we are enabling a second request limit. No mather how many requests you have chosen we offer you a security space of more requests so your application won’t break in a peak of traffic or in the middle of the day.

- Showcase: If you are creating an app and you want to appear highlighted in our website please let us know. It would be nice also it you add it to the handy website programmableweb which features Forvo API.

- Status: Starting this week, you will see a new section when logged in to your account. It’s called “status” and it shows you the current performance and availability of the API. We hope it helps you to see how Forvo is performing or to find punctual problems.

- Third party apps: One sad reminder. If you are using Forvo API key to enable a third party service, remember that it’s not allowed. We also encourage developers to stop this practice as it’s forbidden from the very begining of Forvo. We have not canceled any account yet, and we don’t want to so if you are in this situation please update your application to fulfill the rules.

We are open to listen to your needs so we can improve Forvo API even better.

Forvo Developers

Best Free Reference Web Sites of 2012

Forvo has been selected as one of the MARS Best Free Reference Web Sites of 2012. MARS is the “MARS: Emerging Technologies in Reference” section of the Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association (ALA).

Voted for by member librarians from around the United States, Forvo is one of 26 web pages to be recognized by MARS this year as an outstanding site for reference information and is included in the list of MARS Best of Free Reference Web Sites of 2012

Meeting Forvo editors: Rooibos

Q: A little bit about you.

A: My name is Stefanie “Rooibos” and I’m one of the voices of the German language.

Q: When did you know about Forvo?

A: I discovered Forvo when I was searching for the correct pronunciation of rooibos tea. At that time, waited more than 10,000 unspoken words in the German language! The project immediately intrigued me, especially the idea of being connected linguistically with many people of the earth. I began to speak in my beloved mother tongue, and reported incorrect entries. Many words later, I was asked if I would be interested in becoming an editor… :)

Q: What did you like most?

My personal goal was to work out the sum of the accumulated words. At this time there seemed to be an impossible task… Without time-setting, but with support from experienced users (thanks to fruehsachs) and editors (thanks to wolfganghofmeier!) of the German language we actually succeeded!

A lot of night meetings and many, many hours were needed to cope with the amount of words. I am very grateful for a lot of positive feedback on my pronunciation and it is still important and very exciting to communicate with other users. The idea that my voice can reach all corners of the earth is incredibly exciting!

I am glad that I can be a part of this family in Forvo. <3