On 24.01.2015 23:21, James Heilman wrote:
While human read articles are great they quickly become out of date and are available for only a fraction of our articles.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.
FYI, we have published yesterday Kiwix for Android 1.92 which proposes for the first time TTS. Here is the release note: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/offline-l/2015-January/001296.html
We would be happy to propose this feature to the desktop version too, but AFAIK none of the open source text-to-speech solution is good enough for that. This might be a reason to not have one on the online web site too.
Emmanuel