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I was hoping this would be a way to listen to Wikipedia articles like audiobooks. Unfortunately, the iPhone screen reader is not optimized for reading Wikipedia
by dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
I was hoping this would be a way to listen to Wikipedia articles like audiobooks. Unfortunately, the iPhone screen reader is not optimized for reading Wikipedia:
- It reads footnote links ("one", "fourteen", etc)
- It reads years like numbers ("One thousand, seven hundred and fifty six" instead of "seventeen fifty six").
- It reads introductory metadata, warnings, etc.
- It reads tables.
- It read image captions.
Ideally it wouldn't do any of these things. Basically, it reads the screen from top to bottom, which isn't what a human would do if you asked somebody to read a Wikipedia article to you. If anyone knows a good way to synthesize Wikipedia to speech, that would be so nice!
EDIT: I wonder if Apple would reject such an app from the App Store because it would compete with ebooks.
- CharlesW 6y ago> I wonder if Apple would reject such an app from the App Store because it would compete with ebooks. They would not, unless you went out of your way to violate App Store guidelines. There are currently hundreds of iOS "reader" apps that allow users to consume ebooks[1], graphic novels, articles from Wikipedia and similar sites (i.e. wikiHow), etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_iOS_e-reader_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_iOS_e-reader_sof...
- linksbro 6y agoThere are hundreds of high-quality, spoken articles found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Spoken_articles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Spoken_articles You can find more information about the project here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spoken_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spoken_W...
- cco 6y agoGoogle Assistant does a really good job if you can install it on your iPhone.
- dmitryminkovsky 6y agoOn Wikipedia specifically?
- cco 6y agoYeah, just use Google Assistant to open a Wikipedia page, e.g. "Ok Google, look up Liberalism on Wikipedia". Then say, "Read it", and it'll read it. Its the best artificial voice available in the wild right now I think, it is a pretty good experience.
- dmitryminkovsky 6y agoLooks like it’s available for iOS. Downloaded and looking forward to trying. Thanks!
- 1f60c 6y agoThis also works with the Google app.