On Fri, Sep 12, 2003 at 11:56:38PM -0400, Merritt L. Perkins wrote:
Having Encyclopedia articles read by a human voice would make the files so large that it would be impractical. They would be many times the size of the printed text. How many people remember when a monitor screen was divided into to 30 rows and 80 columns of cells and a cell would hold one character. Characters were perhaps 5 wide by 9 high and defined by an ASCII number. Now word processing programs are much more complicated.
And simple Word-Documents exceed 1MB easily. Recording voice with about 64kbit/s sounds good and don't use so much space. For the first time only "finished" articles would be spoken. And if you're realy in need for spoken words, I'm sure you don't care about file-sizes.
We can also use sound editors for extending the spoken articles or edit it.
ciao, tom