Wikipedia's based audio-guide

Unbelievable! Talking Wikipedia - right in your pocket. Subscribe to the Wikistream and you will receive location-based stories in audio and text format about sights you pass by.

Toozla's audio guide based on Wikipedia is something rather special. We created it by putting together a number of state-of-the-art technologies, and we now proudly present the result.

As you may know, some of the millions of entries in Wikipedia have geographical coordinates (take a look, for example, in the top right-hand corner of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_house). These coordinates represent the first component of our guide.

The smartphone you are using to access the Toozla service is capable of determining your precise geographical location. How? Well, it's a long story. But generally it does it based on information from GPS satellites, the location of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots, and the proximity of mobile operators' base stations. This location-finding is the second component of the guide.

The Toozla service itself uses cloud computing technology. It is in the "cloud" that coordinates are transformed into the names of Wikipedia articles, where the summary of each article is prepared for use in mobile format, and where our teams of robots tirelessly convert the texts of entries into audio files on-the-fly.

The fourth and final component of the guide is the mobile internet. Without it, you would not be able to listen to the audio guide in the exact place where you need it, in other words as you approach the object in question.

All of this means you can now use your mobile to instantly access the whole of the world's knowledge, as expressed by other internet users. And there's no need to search for the information you need – because Toozla automatically delivers you the article relevant to your location. Not only that, but the article will be read out to you, so you don't have to pore over tiny letters on a screen. All you need to do is walk around the city and enjoy.

Example: A story about the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Source: wikipedia.org.

The information in the guide is provided under a Creative Commons licence CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported.