Convert Wikipedia articles from text to speech MP3 podcasts

Posted on December 18, 2007 at 7:35 am

If you’re a big fan of Wikipedia and you love reading their articles, you might be interested in a cool service from Germany that converts the Wikipedia text articles into MP3s that you can listen to. It uses text-to-speech synthesizing technology to dynamically convert any Wikipedia article into an audio book of sorts.

Pediaphon will not only let you convert an Wikipedia article into audio format, such as an MP3, but you can also listen to Wikipedia articles from your cell phone via SMS or a small WAP application.

To get an article converted into speech format, simply type in a search item and the associated Wikipedia article will available for download as MP3 or playable in the browser window directly. It can either use Windows Media player or Java to play the file in the browser for you.

If you really want to listen to a Wikipedia article and you’re unable to get to your computer, you can actually send an SMS with the keyword “pedia” blank “en” (lower case) SEARCH WORD (the term in Wikipedia you want to look up) to +49-151-59111661(Germany). As of right now, they only have German numbers and so you would be charged for sending an International SMS.

Then wait two minutes and call the following German number from the same number you sent the SMS from:

+492311774088

According to the site, they are going to be coming out with US and UK numbers very soon, so it will actually make the service feasible for people here!

Also, they have another feature whereby you can download a WAP application on your cell phone and send the search query using the phone interface. After a minute or so, you’ll get a download link for the converted MP3 on your phone!

Of course, you’re going to want to make sure you have an unlimited data plan or something as these MP3 files will be quite large.

Overall, it’s a pretty cool service for those people who love audio books or love watching podcasts on their favorite media players. Instead of sitting on a computer reading Wikipedia articles, why not listen to them in MP3 format.

I tested the service out on a couple of search terms and was pretty impressed with the conversion quality. Obviously, the text-to-speech translation is not perfect and the beginning part is usually kind of gibberish because it reads the pronunciation of the word, etc, however, the actual meat of the articles are read well!

Try it out and see how you like it! Post a comment on what you think.

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3 Responses to “Convert Wikipedia articles from text to speech MP3 podcasts”

What to do with a broken laptop! | TipsoSaurus-The Techie Dino! Says:

[...] in start menu. 2. MS Office Tip : Repeat previous action using F4. 3. Edit YouTube videos. 4. Listen WikiPedia articles instead of reading them. 5. Make use of your desktop space to max. 6. Schedule your email for [...]
December 18th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
Convert text to audio using iSpeech Says:

[...] I wrote an article on Pediaphon, a free software that you can use to convert Wikipedia articles into MP3s. Though it has it’s problems, it’s a decent for anyone who really doesn’t have the time to [...]
November 20th, 2008 at 5:45 am
Turn Wikipedia articles into audio format | Lifehacker Australia Says:

[...] Convert Wikipedia Articles from Text to Speech MP3 podcasts [Online Tech Tips] Tagged:auaudio booksmp3spodcastswikipedia [...]
April 14th, 2009 at 8:35 pm