HN Explorer

4 comments

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dbatten
Built this tool after my wife and I found ourselves wishing for something like it while pregnant with our first baby. Type in a name, and you'll find others that sound similar.

Really interested in hearing thoughts/feedback from the community... Also interested in how the site holds up under load.

Thanks!

digital_ins
Nice! What's the thought process behind the recommendation? Are you using spelling similarities, or something like that?
dbatten
I actually used a tool from CMU (link below) to convert the names to their pronunciations, represented as a series of phonemes or sounds. I then simply compare the similarities in the sound representation of the different names. It's an extremely simple algorithm, but it works pretty well.

http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/tools/lextool.html