Toozla and Acapela Release a Global Audio Guide Based on Wikipedia, Voice Empowered by Acapela Speech Synthesis
Wikipedia is now available to travelers worldwide in the form of a convenient audio guide. Thanks to Acapela text to speech, the written information is automatically vocalized, providing travelers with easy listening descriptions of hundreds of thousands of tourist attractions.
Moscow, Russia, July 02, 2010 --(PR.com)-- Toozla LLC have released an audio guide based on Wikipedia – called Wikistream. Travellers can now access up to a million descriptions of tourist attractions in English. The highly technically advanced Toozla guide incorporates Acapela’s state-of-the-art text-to-speech engine.
In total, Wikipedia contains descriptions of more than a million geographical locations – and rising.
To use the Toozla service, tourists just need to install a small, free application on their smartphone. Their mobile must be capable of determining its location (i.e. it must have a GPS module). However, Toozla keeps all complex technical goings-on hidden from the user, to allow tourists to concentrate on enjoying their travels, rather than poring over tiny letters on the screen of their phone. Supported devices: Android, iPhone, Java (i.e. Nokia, Motorola and SonyEricsson).
A key characteristic of the Toozla guide operates on a similar principle to Wikipedia: any user can supplement the cumulative body of knowledge by creating an audio comment. The mobile application has a facility for recording speech. A few seconds after it is recorded, the user’s spoken comment is anchored to the location where it was created, and all other users of the service can then listen to it.
“This means an endless audio guide can be created for every corner of the Earth. Tourists will feel more at home in unfamiliar cities – because they will receive all the cumulative knowledge available about each place they visit, the moment they arrive there,” explains Alexei Cherenkov, director of Toozla. “Everyone will have their own mobile guardian angel.”
At present Toozla offers a number of central “streams”, some free, and some available for a fee: a weather service, professional multilingual audio guides, and the new Wikistream. Work is already underway to make more global streams available.
Because Toozla is a platform, access to the system can be licensed to companies (for example car hire or hotel companies). In addition, content partners can create their own (audio and text) guides, which they can provide to mobile phone users at low cost, because the software needed has already been developed.
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In total, Wikipedia contains descriptions of more than a million geographical locations – and rising.
To use the Toozla service, tourists just need to install a small, free application on their smartphone. Their mobile must be capable of determining its location (i.e. it must have a GPS module). However, Toozla keeps all complex technical goings-on hidden from the user, to allow tourists to concentrate on enjoying their travels, rather than poring over tiny letters on the screen of their phone. Supported devices: Android, iPhone, Java (i.e. Nokia, Motorola and SonyEricsson).
A key characteristic of the Toozla guide operates on a similar principle to Wikipedia: any user can supplement the cumulative body of knowledge by creating an audio comment. The mobile application has a facility for recording speech. A few seconds after it is recorded, the user’s spoken comment is anchored to the location where it was created, and all other users of the service can then listen to it.
“This means an endless audio guide can be created for every corner of the Earth. Tourists will feel more at home in unfamiliar cities – because they will receive all the cumulative knowledge available about each place they visit, the moment they arrive there,” explains Alexei Cherenkov, director of Toozla. “Everyone will have their own mobile guardian angel.”
At present Toozla offers a number of central “streams”, some free, and some available for a fee: a weather service, professional multilingual audio guides, and the new Wikistream. Work is already underway to make more global streams available.
Because Toozla is a platform, access to the system can be licensed to companies (for example car hire or hotel companies). In addition, content partners can create their own (audio and text) guides, which they can provide to mobile phone users at low cost, because the software needed has already been developed.
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Contact
Toozla LLC
Alexei Cherenkov
+7(926)8348665
toozla.com
Alexei Cherenkov
+7(926)8348665
toozla.com
Contact
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