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

[Ray Saintonge]

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.
>
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.

>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?
>
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