[Wikipedia-l] Re: Conference report from South Africa

[Mark Williamson]

And I should add, why do we need a spoken Wikipedia? Wouldn't it be
better to adapt a TTS engine to get articles from Wikipedia, and read
them? Remember, TTS engines can be made for any language, and it's
becoming increasingly easy to make them even if you're not an expert.

Mark

On 25/04/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Timwi, if you doubt the accent problem is a real one, you clearly have
> not heard many different accents in your life.
> 
> Even when spoken slowly and clearly, there are some accents that are
> well near unintelligible to those with a certain different accent, at
> least without being around them for a while.
> 
> And what about accents that some might deem "incorrect"? The typical
> Singaporean accent might be called incorrect by some, and those of
> "foreigners" would most likely be called incorrect by quite a few
> people.
> 
> Some people would say that any accent other than the "standard" (with
> English, being official in more than one nation, there is no single
> "standard", but people often being ignoramuses we can expect that they
> will say "Sure, the ____ and the _____ have their 'standard accent',
> but ours is the only correct one." (making little imaginary quote
> marks around "standard accent")
> 
> If you listen to a sampling of a wide range of accents in English, you
> will almost certainly find one that, even when spoken "slowly" and
> "clearly", you have a great difficulty understanding.
> 
> With some languages this is even worse.
> 
> Mark
> 
> On 25/04/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> > Andy Rabagliati wrote:
> > > On Sun, 24 Apr 2005, Timwi wrote:
> > >
> > >>Heh! All the more incentive to get more people to participate in
> > >>[[Wikipedia:WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia]] (shameless plug)! Nobody
> > >>really wants machine-generated spoken versions when a real human-spoken
> > >>version is available. :)
> > >
> > > There was some discussion of that. Two (very real) problems :-
> > >
> > > * Editing. Voice editing sounds clumsy, and would sound like CamelCase :-)
> >
> > Of course, you cannot edit a sound file in the same way that you can
> > edit text. But you're not supposed to, anyway; the sound file is not an
> > original article, but a reading of an existing textual version. My hope
> > is that once most featured articles have a recording, the regular
> > participants in the Spoken Wikipedia project will be happy to update
> > their own sound files as the article changes significantly. If someone
> > doesn't, well, then I guess someone else will have to re-read the entire
> > article, but if someone's happy to do that (which isn't unlikely if the
> > recording is significantly out of date) then there's no problem with that.
> >
> > > * Accents. If an Indian is trying to understand what a Geordie or
> > >   someone from Barbados is saying, it might as well be in Afrikaans :-)
> >
> > I'm not sure how large and how representative a sample of listeners you
> > have already surveyed, but I highly doubt this is a real problem. The
> > recordings are obviously supposed to be spoken slowly and clearly.
> >
> > Are you a native speaker of English? Where are you from? What accents do
> > you tend to have trouble understanding?
> >
> > Timwi
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
> 
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-- 
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE