Hi all,
For some time, with some friends we have been playing with a prototype that makes it possible to search content from Mediawiki by sending text messages (SMS) from your phone. You send your search term to to the server and after receiving the text message the server (Asterisk) makes a call back to you and plays the audio content (if there is audio) or text to speech will read you the text content found fro the corresponding article. During the call you can navigate in the article with the DTMF/touchtone key presses. For instance you can jump to next section and record audio to any of the sections.
Right now we do not have the energy needed to develop the prototype further. For this reason we would be happy to give it as a project for some developer interested in to take a leadership of it.
The development site is in here:
A blog and background information about the project is here:
Please, let me know if you (or you know someone who) could be interested in to work with this.
We are happy to keep on hosting the development site (http:// dev.mobiled.org/trac/), the SVN and give all support one may need to get on working with this.
The prototype is in a stage that one can set it up, but the whole thing is not packaged in a way that other people could take it in use in any easy way. There are also some specific hardware requirements and you also needs a phone line to make it work.
So, for what one can use the audio mobile wiki?
We have tested it with Wikipedia content and in a way it works. You can very check pretty fast some basic facts with it when not close to web. For instance, if you just want to know some basic things about some country the Wikipedia format works for this purpose pretty well also when used with this.
We also have made some school pilots where students were providing content to the wiki in form of "podcasts" they recorded with the phone. It was fun and also worked out pretty well.
RIght now we are writing a paper claiming that most likely the mobile audio could work nicely as some kind of craigslist in places where there aren't internet connections but mobile phones. One could have in a wiki server local news, classified, jobs, housing, for sale etc. - all content mainly provided by the people with their phone and by recording their ads to the server under the right search term.
Why we think that this is important?
Most people in the world do not have an internet connection. Most people have mobile phones - those simple ones with text message and voice.
Why we are no more interested in to develop this?
We are, but we simply do not have the right skills set: very limited knowhow of Mediawiki and Asterisk. From our side the MobilED research - we are a research group - is pretty much done. What we did was contextual inquiry, participatory design, prototype development and piloting of the idea with real people. We also have reported this work in various forums. However, event with this announcement of looking for a main software developer for the open source project we are not going to leave the MobilED totally behind. We still want to be involved in it and do more our kind of research when there is a need for it.
Best regards,
- Teemu
Hi Teemu,
this sounds very interesting. I hope you will find support for this project. It would be nice if there could be a possibility to use the interface with voice or number keys input. This could open this service for users of non-sms phones as well, for example for buyers of the Braille phone ($20) from Spice Ltd. This could give many poor people from developing countries access to all the info from Mediawiki based Wikis. This is especially interesting for persons with blindness, , dyslexia or illiteracy limitations.
Btw, your blog with the background information seems to have a porn spam problem.
Best, Per
----- Original Message ----- From: "Teemu Leinonen" teemu.leinonen@taik.fi To: wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 7:46 AM Subject: [Wikitech-l] Audio wiki for mobile phones - looking for a home
Hi all,
For some time, with some friends we have been playing with a prototype that makes it possible to search content from Mediawiki by sending text messages (SMS) from your phone. You send your search term to to the server and after receiving the text message the server (Asterisk) makes a call back to you and plays the audio content (if there is audio) or text to speech will read you the text content found fro the corresponding article. During the call you can navigate in the article with the DTMF/touchtone key presses. For instance you can jump to next section and record audio to any of the sections.
Right now we do not have the energy needed to develop the prototype further. For this reason we would be happy to give it as a project for some developer interested in to take a leadership of it.
The development site is in here:
A blog and background information about the project is here:
Please, let me know if you (or you know someone who) could be interested in to work with this.
We are happy to keep on hosting the development site (http:// dev.mobiled.org/trac/), the SVN and give all support one may need to get on working with this.
The prototype is in a stage that one can set it up, but the whole thing is not packaged in a way that other people could take it in use in any easy way. There are also some specific hardware requirements and you also needs a phone line to make it work.
So, for what one can use the audio mobile wiki?
We have tested it with Wikipedia content and in a way it works. You can very check pretty fast some basic facts with it when not close to web. For instance, if you just want to know some basic things about some country the Wikipedia format works for this purpose pretty well also when used with this.
We also have made some school pilots where students were providing content to the wiki in form of "podcasts" they recorded with the phone. It was fun and also worked out pretty well.
RIght now we are writing a paper claiming that most likely the mobile audio could work nicely as some kind of craigslist in places where there aren't internet connections but mobile phones. One could have in a wiki server local news, classified, jobs, housing, for sale etc.
- all content mainly provided by the people with their phone and by
recording their ads to the server under the right search term.
Why we think that this is important?
Most people in the world do not have an internet connection. Most people have mobile phones - those simple ones with text message and voice.
Why we are no more interested in to develop this?
We are, but we simply do not have the right skills set: very limited knowhow of Mediawiki and Asterisk. From our side the MobilED research
- we are a research group - is pretty much done. What we did was
contextual inquiry, participatory design, prototype development and piloting of the idea with real people. We also have reported this work in various forums. However, event with this announcement of looking for a main software developer for the open source project we are not going to leave the MobilED totally behind. We still want to be involved in it and do more our kind of research when there is a need for it.
Best regards,
- Teemu
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Per wrote:
Hi Teemu,
this sounds very interesting. I hope you will find support for this project. It would be nice if there could be a possibility to use the interface with voice or number keys input. This could open this service for users of non-sms phones as well, for example for buyers of the Braille phone ($20) from Spice Ltd. This could give many poor people from developing countries access to all the info from Mediawiki based Wikis. This is especially interesting for persons with blindness, , dyslexia or illiteracy limitations.
For people with blindness, I think it would be most useful to export to DAISY. DAISY is the defacto standard for audio books for the vision impaired. Many hardware devices are available to play it, and some libraries now carry audio book collections in this format as well as players available for loan.
-- Tim Starling
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org