Has anyone come across an online dictionary with wildcard search, and recognizing word stress, vowel vs consonant?
It would not hurt if future dictionaries additionally were capable of finding words with certain patterns of stress shift across different parts of speech, but that is probably a matter of a few years.
Do you mean a dictionary where you can find the word you need, without knowing how to spell it? I don't know if there are any tools like this now, but hopefully someone else does. I'm sure many dictionary users find this issue frustrating.
This is probably a terrible suggestion (because of the still primitive nature of the tool), but have you tried speaking into google? Use voice recognition to type (beta) - Google Chrome Help They have "voice recognition" which might be a way to develop this sort of tool.
How do you imagine this tool to work? It seems like a clever idea, can you explain it a bit?