Il 24/Gen/2015 23:21 "James Heilman" jmh649@gmail.com ha scritto:
While human read articles are great they quickly become out of date and
are
available for only a fraction of our articles.
Why don't we have a "Listen" button beside our read button that when clicked will read the article for the person in question?
There are 37 open source text-to-speech listed here http://www.findbestopensource.com/tagged/text-to-speech. Some of them support up to 50 languages. This of course would require the support of
the
Wikimedia Foundation.
I guess we could also do it with a gadget initially. Thoughts?
(only marginally related, but this is to say that I like this idea)
A couple of years ago I contacted a professor at the University of Siena (Tuscany, Italy) which was the head of a project that built a text-to-sign-language converter. The software was converting text in Italian to LIS (Lingua Italiana dei Segni, Italian Sign Language) and was tested also on the public television (see the website below).
The software is called Blue Sign: http://www.bluesign.it/
Basically, since the website said that the project was over, I asked them to re-release the code with a free/libre open license which is a precondition to use it on Wikipedia.
Despite some initial interest in the end the professor told me that it was too complicated to contact every author (actually an handful of people) to obtain their permission, so in the end this resulted in nothing :(.
Cristian