Some of you may remember the project to bring spoken (synthesized speech) Wikipedia content to mobile phones. Teemu Leinonen of the University of Art and Design Helsinki, who is leading the project, has informed me: "We already have the phone system to receive the SMS, to do the calls back, TTP and system to record callers contributions." The project now also has a website at:
They want to run a school pilot in South Africa soon. This is a very important project as it can bring Wikipedia content to nations with insufficient Internet access but reasonable cell phone coverage, which includes some developing countries. Given that the system operates by providing a free callback after you send an SMS requesting an article, it provides almost completely free access to the content.
As noted above, the project is envisioned to allow people to contribute in their native language, so at some point we'll have to talk to Teemu's team about dealing with call-in contributions on the level of our project communities.
The website has a couple of (slightly campy) demonstration videos. Browsing around, it seems that they are using Asterisk and a nifty-looking open source tool called "Dialog Palette" to develop the telephony server:
http://dialogpalette.sourceforge.net/
The idea is that anyone can set up similar telephony services for any kind of content, using only open source software.
To keep up to date on the project's progress, you can subscribe to their RSS feed at: http://mobiled.uiah.fi/?feed=rss2
Regards,
Erik