1. Instead of reading an Encyclopedia article from the screen would it be nice to be able to lean back and have it read. to you by a synthetic voice? I believe that such programs already exist. Would anything need to be done to the articles so that such programs would work?. . My computer has such a text to voice program in Dragon NaturallySpeaking 7 but it does not want to work for me. Perhaps it is not compatible with XP. 2. While it would not be part of Wikipedia would free lessons in foreign languages be a good idea? Once you get started you need to get practice using the language and Encyclopedia articles might furnish such practice. Is anybody interested? Just daydreaming. Merritt L. Perkins
--- "Merritt L. Perkins" mlperkins3@juno.com wrote:
- Instead of reading an Encyclopedia article from
the screen would it be nice to be able to lean back and have it read. to you by a synthetic voice? I believe that such programs already exist. Would anything need to be done to the articles so that such programs would work?.
They are available in the plenty. Ive never used them -- Dragon or other TTS software before -- maybe someone else knows a good prog.
. My computer has such a text to voice program in Dragon NaturallySpeaking 7 but it does not want to work for me. Perhaps it is not compatible with XP.
Its a good guess, but often there are simple audio problems at work. Do a check of all your audio settings/wires and make sure that no other audio prog is running.
- While it would not be part of Wikipedia would
free lessons in foreign languages be a good idea? Once you get started you need to get practice using the language and Encyclopedia articles might furnish such practice. Is anybody interested? Just daydreaming. Merritt L. Perkins
I like this idea -- all we have now is the "Common phrases" (in various languages ?) page. Search 'common phrases'
This could be a good starting point and blossom from there. Aslo, I understand that there are some efforts to write books on Wikibooks.org that are language instruction oriented.
Hows your wikiing going, Merritt? Do you have a login? ~S~
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On Thu, Sep 11, 2003 at 10:38:12PM -0400, Merritt L. Perkins wrote:
- Instead of reading an Encyclopedia article from the screen would it be
nice to be able to lean back and have it read. to you by a synthetic voice? I believe that such programs already exist. Would anything need to be done to the articles so that such programs would work?. . My computer has such a text to voice program in Dragon NaturallySpeaking 7 but it does not want to work for me. Perhaps it is not compatible with XP. 2. While it would not be part of Wikipedia would free lessons in foreign languages be a good idea? Once you get started you need to get practice using the language and Encyclopedia articles might furnish such practice. Is anybody interested?
In the German mailing-list I've suggest spoken articles a few weeks ago. I've tried to contact a German blind association but got no response so the idea went sleeping. In my opinion human read articles should be much better than synthetic ones. Not only for blind, but also for learners (no matter if it's due to analphabetism or foreign language) that would be useful. Technic ideas would be the ogg-format for encoding the spoken words and something like bittorent to distributed it (to lessen traffic for wikipedia).
One central question is how exactly the same article and spoken words must be. For learners it surely will matter.
ciao, tom
Merritt L. Perkins wrote:
- Instead of reading an Encyclopedia article from the screen would it be
nice to be able to lean back and have it read. to you by a synthetic voice? I believe that such programs already exist. Would anything need to be done to the articles so that such programs would work?. . My computer has such a text to voice program in Dragon NaturallySpeaking 7 but it does not want to work for me. Perhaps it is not compatible with XP.
This certainly sounds like a good idea. It should be possible with already available text-to-speech programs, but if there is anything particularly problematic about Wikipedia's current formatting that makes it difficult to use, it would be interesting to find out about it.
- While it would not be part of Wikipedia would free lessons in foreign
languages be a good idea? Once you get started you need to get practice using the language and Encyclopedia articles might furnish such practice. Is anybody interested? Just daydreaming.
This sounds like a good project fot the WikiBooks project --- producing fully multimedia textbooks to learn a foreign language.
-Mark
Merritt L. Perkins wrote
- Instead of reading an Encyclopedia article from the screen would it be
nice to be able to lean back and have it read. to you by a synthetic voice? I believe that such programs already exist. Would anything need to be done to the articles so that such programs would work?. . My computer has such a text to voice program in Dragon NaturallySpeaking 7 but it does not want to work for me. Perhaps it is not compatible with XP.
Resolving this kind of conflict may be user specific. It will depend on the requirements of the voice program software. Normally I might suggest that you read the manual, but in this case, given the nature of the software, you should be able to listen to the manual. :-) It should tell you what it requires of the texts that it reads to you. I would assume that it could handle plain text. If you can feed the printable version of an article, it should work.
Reading a text with your eyes seems a lot more efficient than having it read aloud. There is, of course, a distinction to be made between visual and aural learners. Nevertheless, given the quantity of material that must sometimes be reviewed, when we read a text we can automatically skim over less important details. This luxury is unavailable when every word of a text must be vocalized. To attain the same speed, it would need to be read at a pace beyond comprehension.
- While it would not be part of Wikipedia would free lessons in foreign
languages be a good idea? Once you get started you need to get practice using the language and Encyclopedia articles might furnish such practice. Is anybody interested?
There is already a good beginning for a Polish language course on Wiktionary, though I expect it will in due course be moved to Wikibooks. If I understand correctly vocalizing programs still need to be trained to the user's accent. I'm sure that the entire Wikimedia community will be interested in your reports about your efforts in rendering a language which appears totally unpronounceable to many English eyes. Indeed, the difficulties may be illusory since Polish children can pronounce their language perfectly well before they learn to read. Compare this with the fact that English speaking children have no problems distinguishing between "tough", "through", "thorough", "though", etc.long before they learn to read.
Ec
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