Andy Rabagliati wrote:
On Sun, 24 Apr 2005, Timwi wrote:
Heh! All the more incentive to get more people to participate in [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia]] (shameless plug)! Nobody really wants machine-generated spoken versions when a real human-spoken version is available. :)
There was some discussion of that. Two (very real) problems :-
- Editing. Voice editing sounds clumsy, and would sound like CamelCase :-)
Of course, you cannot edit a sound file in the same way that you can edit text. But you're not supposed to, anyway; the sound file is not an original article, but a reading of an existing textual version. My hope is that once most featured articles have a recording, the regular participants in the Spoken Wikipedia project will be happy to update their own sound files as the article changes significantly. If someone doesn't, well, then I guess someone else will have to re-read the entire article, but if someone's happy to do that (which isn't unlikely if the recording is significantly out of date) then there's no problem with that.
- Accents. If an Indian is trying to understand what a Geordie or someone from Barbados is saying, it might as well be in Afrikaans :-)
I'm not sure how large and how representative a sample of listeners you have already surveyed, but I highly doubt this is a real problem. The recordings are obviously supposed to be spoken slowly and clearly.
Are you a native speaker of English? Where are you from? What accents do you tend to have trouble understanding?
Timwi