[Wikipedia-l] Re: text to voice; learning languages

[Thomas R. Koll]

On Thu, Sep 11, 2003 at 10:38:12PM -0400, Merritt L. Perkins wrote:
>         
> 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?

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
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