PediaPhon: Listen to Wikipedia Articles

December 28th, 2007 at 04:42am ibrahimo

We have to admit something in the start, that it is pretty sad that we are about to enter 2008 and we still do not have a proper text-to-speech application. In this world full of technological advancements, still the text-to-speech is not advancing to reach to a normal human voice. All what we get is a very edgy robotic voice, the quality varies between different applications, but they all have one thing in common, that it does not sound real.

That being said, there are some websites who provide text-to-speech services, different kind of services, also those have variations in quality. PediaPhon is one of those kind of web applications, it lets you listen to Wikipedia articles, simply search for any topic and listen, it offers you three options:

1. Generate an MP3 file and download it and listen to it on your PC or portable player.
2. Listen online streaming using Windows Media Player.
3. Listen online using JAVA.

This is a very interesting, useful application, but the voice being used just does not help it. I tried it on couple of different topics and I couldn’t keep listening for more than half a minute.

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Entry Filed under: Tech