Wikipedia develops first crowdsourced speech engine

Joakim Gustafson, a professor of speech technology at KTH, says that the project aims to provide access to Wikipedia and other wikis to people with reading difficulties or visual impairment.

"Initially, our focus will be on the Swedish language, where we will make use of our own language resources," Gustafson says. "Then we will do a basic English voice, which we expect to be quite good, given the large amount of open source linguistic resources. And finally, we will do a rudimentary Arabic voice that will be more a proof of concept."

An estimated 25% of all Wikipedia users—nearly 125 million people per month—need or prefer text in spoken form, according to PTS.

Like Wikipedia's content, the speech output will be crowdsourced, with users contributing to the continuous development of the synthesiser.

Once the English, Swedish and Arabic speech engines are produced, sometime around September 2017, it will be possible with the help of users to extend synthesised speech to the remaining 280 languages in which Wikipedia is available.

All material produced will be freely licensed and can be used for free by anyone, in line with the rules of Wikimedia Commons.

The Wikispeech pilot project is a collaboration between KTH, the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority, Wikimedia Sweden and STTS speech technology services. PTS is financing the project.