Getting started with TEVA

The NKI TE-VOICE ANALYSIS tool (TEVA) is a multi-platform stand-alone application. It is available for MS Windows, Apple Macintosh OSX, and Linux. It is also available as a separate interactive Praat script (www.praat.org).

Getting a copy of TEVA

TEVA is licensed under the GNU GPLv2 and can be freely used and distributed. You can download a copy of TEVA from www.fon.hum.uva.nl/IFA-SpokenLanguageCorpora/NKIcorpora/NKI_TEVA/ . TEVA can be saved on your hard disk or USB thumb drive and started by clicking on the icon.

The TEVA pages

After you start TEVA, a window will appear. This will initially contain the Main page. In normal practice, this is the page you will spend most of your time in. There is a second page which allows you to change the settings of the application, the Configuration page. You can turn pages using a button on the top right of each page (with an arrow symbol →).

Each page contains a number of buttons. The Main page also contains a canvas which is used to draw the results of the analysis on. You interact with TEVA by clicking the buttons. For instance, at the top-right of the Main page, there is a Quit button labeled with a red X cross that will terminate the application when you click on it. While the TEVA application is busy processing whatever the click of a button asks it to do, the button will be grayed out (the label will be gray too instead of black or colored). While a button is grayed out, TEVA will not respond to other button clicks.

Every button has a keyboard shortcut. This shortcut is generally a single character, one of the letters of the label on the button. That character will be printed in italic in the label. For instance, in English, the Quit button is labeled Quit (with an italic Q). Hitting the Q key (upper or lowercase) will terminate the program.

You can change the size of the TEVA window just as you can with every other window on your desktop. However, you will notice that the positioning of the buttons and texts on the page will be off. Sometimes the windows will look completely scrambled. The page can be redrawn with the Refresh button or by hitting the space bar. Use the space bar when the page is so scrambled that you cannot click the Refresh button anymore.

Each page contains a Help button. This button is labeled with a ? question mark. Hitting the ? or / key will start the interactive Help service. While Help is active, a single line of help text will appear whenever you click a button. Clicking the Help button again will stop the Help service. The help text for each button will include the keyboard shortcuts in the current language.

General functions

Here are descriptions of a few often used buttons for general use. English labels will be used here. The keyboard shortcuts are given between the [brackets] (might depend on language).

On the Main page
Quit: [Q] Stop TEVA. Will save the current preferences
Settings: [S] Go to Configuration page
Refresh: [h] Redraw the current page, hitting the space-bar always refreshes the screen
Help: [?] Press on the button you want information on, press Help again to continue
  
On the Configuration page
Help: [?] Press the button you want information on, press Help again to continue
Return: [R] Go back to Main page
English: [E] Use English labels and help
Deutsch: [D] Use German labels and help
Nederlands: [N] Use Dutch labels and help
Manual: [M] Display this manual

More can be found in Overview of Main page and Overview of Configuration page.

Language support

TEVA supports a few languages, currently English, German, and Dutch. Extending this to other languages is rather easy (just translating a few dozen sentences). But it can only be done with the help of a native speakers of that language. Please contact us if you would like to help to port TEVA to your language.

Links to this page


© R.J.J.H. van Son, December 6, 2011