User:Sebastian Berlin (WMSE)/Wikispeech/Wikispeech 2016
| Start: | 2016-03-15 |
| End: | 2017-09-15 |
| Team: | Wikimedia Sverige, STTS – speech technology services and KTH Royal Institute of Technology – Speech, Music and Hearing (part of School of Computer Science and Communication) |
| Management: | John Andersson (Project Manager), André Costa, Sebastian Berlin |
Wikispeech 2016, the first Wikispeech project, aimed to create an open source TTS (text-to-speech) tool, to make the Wikimedia projects more accessible. This would help a lot of people who, for different reasons, prefer to access information by listening rather than reading. The focus was on Wikipedia, being the most well used among them and containing primarily written information. That said, there are plenty of other applications that could benefit from a freely available TTS solution, both among and outside the Wikimedia projects.
Wikispeech 2016 went from March 2016 to September 2017, preceded by a pilot study in 2015, and was financed by the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS). During this time, a MediaWiki extension was developed alongside a TTS server. At the end of the project, it had support for English, Swedish and Arabic and was built modularly to allow adding more languages and voices later on. The interface allows the user to listen to an article, navigate by skipping back and forth and includes highlighting the text that is being read.
Activating the Wikispeech extension on Wikipedia is planned as part of Wikispeech 2019.
About
editWith the help of synthetic speech, people who find it easier to assimilate information through speech than text can get equal access to the information. In the long run the open nature of the project will make it possible to develop new ways of presenting spoken information, e.g. through a player intended for mobile phones. This could include those with visual impairment, dyslexia or who are not literate. The approximately 25% of people who find it easier to learn from spoken text could utilize this functionality as well as those who wish to learn at the same time as they do something else (e.g. driving). 25% of the readers of Wikipedia would mean that approximately 115–125 million people would benefit from the project in the long run.
Those who have received a medical diagnosis regarding limitations in reading comprehension (e.g. dyslexia, visual impairment or cognitive impairment) often have access to technological aids. This however very often requires a diagnosis, that you live in a high income country and that the language you speak has working text-to-speech for this to be a solution to the accessibility problem. People with poor reading comprehension (from unaccustomed readers to analphabets) also have limited access to commercial tools even if this would improve their understanding. This is especially true if they do not wish to share their data with one of the IT behemoths. To conclude, the assessment is that a very large group would benefit from built in text-to-speech on Wikipedia. Making all of the websites which use MediaWiki more accessible to those who find it hard to assimilate written information is therefore incredibly important.
The project will increase the accessibility of one of the most important websites. All other platforms using MediaWiki will be able to make use of the technical solutions which are developed during the project. That is several thousand websites which quick and easy will be able to activate text-to-speech.