Hi all, I am freqeunt reader to wikihow and this is my first post here. some days ago I came across a nice website www.vocalware.com
Now I have an idea. is it possible for you to make some cooperation with them to help us (listen) to your articles instead of readin them? yes I can copy paste from your site texts to their demo box and listen, but I think it will be something new and great of i can listen right here directly, thank you in advance.
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Welcome to wikiHow! That is a unique and interesting idea. I’m not sure if it would be something we could do at the moment however. As much as I like the idea and think it’s cool, we may not be able to make it work.
of course #we_can_make_it_work
@Rosie
it’s a very good idea too, this would be great, contact #JEff
so that he can make arrangements
Jeff? Isorhythmic? I’m assuming that wikiHaus would set it up. (If this even happened.)
We’d need programmers to make the changes, Akash, and, it’s not that easy - It would also take community approval, so, a discussion about it is not a bad idea (moving threads). I really like the idea - Being read a wikiHow article. However, if you heard it, by someone telling it to you (a robot, perhaps), it’d take the fun of imagining what to do what the article says out of it. Not sure if I’m making sense here. (: June Days
system
6
The technology already exists for this… audio readout of websites… for visually impaired. The downside to this idea as I considered it was that, wikihow being a wiki and all… our articles are in a continual flux. They change, improve, adjust, expand, etc. So creating a SINGLE version of any given article will “date” it and slide it into the “obsolete” category pretty quickly over time.
@Junedays
such type of software is #easy
to create as it may sound, i’m also a @programmer
and i know, it’s #difficulty_is_Medium
, not hard. And why wouldn’t the community approve this #innovative_idea
…
Loiswade proves a very good point. And besides, what if the audio is saved with a vandalized page?
Ecto5
9
Why store hard copies of the audio? We can use a browser based text to speech converter… Though there are softwares like these for the visually impaired, a software ( or browser plugin) specifically designed to read wikiHow articles (most softwares won’t be able to parse the steps and sub steps properly) would be helpful and improve the accessibility of the website.
system
10
Okay… A few other issues to consider… We’ve got millions of users (the userpage count is waaaaay up there anyhow) We play around on a heavily modified version of mediawiki software… which can’t just be “upgraded” to the next version… it would have to be a heavily modified version of the new version… requiring a lot of engineering work… WikiHow employs less than 10 people (I think perhaps it’s 5 or 6?) to keep the site running as is… Given the above, I have to say that I think we’re all being overly optimistic about the difficulty level presented by this proposed project. If this proposal is so easy as you say? Why not tweak a GNU or freeware text reading program for wikiHow reading yourself and donate the finished product to wikiHow rather than insisting that someone else do it for you… ?
This certainly is an innovative idea. However, as Lois Wade ( @Loiswade42
) pointed out, this is not easy to implement. Many changes are made to articles everyday, and thus, to have an updated version of the audio would be next to impossible. There are text-readers available, but they are not very accurate. They may read the words correctly, but it is still not very easy to understand them. Also, this would be a big engineering project. We would like to implement every feature that could help our readers, but engineer’s time is an issue. If we can implement this in the future, it would be fantastic!
@everybody
, why are we trying to run away from this #Awesome_innovative_idea
. I think that it’s cool and undergoing a major edit to bring out #the_next_big_thing
is totally worth it… Now all we need to do is send this thread to @JAck
so that he will respond. I’ sure #he_likes_the_idea
Ecto5
13
@Akash
Dahal Understand that implementing such a feature is not an easy task, especially considering wikiHow’s limited staff. Though such a feature would be beneficial to a lot of people, It will (i think) require a lot of modification to the already modified mediawiki software.
The idea is nice but like all said, it is very difficult to do something like this. Maybe, one day we will have something like this.
We like the idea, but liking something and bringing it to life are different things.
Marina
16
Exactly. We love how wikiHow is expanding, however lots of planning goes into these sorts of things. Try to develop the idea more and decide if it’s plausible before jumping in c:
@everybody
why are all you wishing to get it later on… comon i thought #everybody_would_agree
on this (that you did) but where’s the #encouragement
to the little staffs @Wikihow
… they might be thinking that we’ve underestimated them by telling that this feature is hard to make, which is #not_the_case
Please understand that there are votes against this - As there will always be with new ideas. We’re not trying to beat down the idea, we’re just looking at the pros and cons. Not every idea can be accepted; even if one person thinks it’s a good idea, others may not. That’s why it’s open for discussion. (; June Days
The wikiHow staff doesn’t cater to our every whims. They don’t take every one of our ideas and create it. Besides, they have lives outside of the wikiHaus.
I would separate two things here: 1) Turning articles into audio with automated text-to-speech software.I think this is an unqualifiedly bad idea
because it sounds like ass, and will sound like ass for a long time to come barring some unexpected advances in the software. Try the demo on Vocalware’s site; to a native speaker of English it sounds plain awful. Even if we did have the engineering resources to integrate text-to-speech into our site, we’d end up with crappy-sounding audio versions of articles. For the folks that need
audio versions of articles, this isn’t an improvement over what they already use (screen-reading software); for those that merely want
audio versions of articles it’s a half-assed and barely-listenable solution. 2) Having audio versions of articles.This is an unqualifiedly awesome idea
and not even a technically difficult one to implement, if
we can get enough people with good recording equipment and a fluent, pleasant, relatively-neutral voice to commit to doing the recordings (the hardest part of this, actually, is a community issue, which is that we’d have to have high quality standards, and feelings would be hurt at some point). We’d only need to crank out two of these per week and in a couple of years we’d have a library of 200 how-to pieces that people could download to listen on their drive to work, play on their podcasts, and all the other good stuff. There’s an idea for the near future, anyway!
