Friendly approach: Wikipedia wants to be able to read content aloud to its users.
The world's first cowdsourced web-based encyclopaedia is working with Sweden's KTH Royal Institute of Technology with the goal of developing the world's first crowdsourced speech engine.
Wikipedia wants to be able to read content aloud to its users with reading difficulties or visual impairments and to do so in a number of languages in a natural, convincing tone.
Via the partnership a synthesis platform capable of speaking Swedish, English and Arabic will be built. However, it will be down to Wikipedia contributors and visitors to help constantly improve its capabilities.
And, like everything connected with the organisation, the resulting platform will be open source meaning that anyone could potentially apply its code to other projects that use MediaWiki software.
A basic version of the speech synthesis platform supporting Swedish, Arabic and English is expected to be up and running before the end of 2016. Then attention will turn to other languages. — AFP Relaxnews
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