Wikipedia on steroids

[Daryn]

I've been using this for a while now, since the closed beta stage. Now that it's open I think it's worth a link.

Check out Qwiki, a wikipedia mashup that really shows off what you can do with modern web tech.

Check it out and do a search, it's really quite cool.

[Wolfgang of Borg]

Strongly needs the voice of Peter Jones

[Daryn]

Oh I don't know, there's something rather appealing about that robot lady.

[Brome Teks]

Ehh, call me old fashioned, but this is no bedtime story. I want to read, not be read to. I'd much prefer to read at my own rate so I can look ahead and look back if the script references something else it said a couple paragraphs ago.

[Daryn]

I guess being someone that really enjoys audiobooks this is something that really appeals to me. It's a great presentation in that respect.

[Dusty]

The text to speech is miles ahead of other stuff I've seen, even if it still shows its flaws here and there. "Xbox three Hundred and Sixty."

All in all I think its a interesting concept with a fairly good execution right now. Some of the main issues I see with it is the video/picture pairing can be a little bit off from the narration. I think that comes from bad tags mostly. As far as usefulness? I'm not really sure, maybe as a quick reference....

[SliceOfDog]

As a couple guys have said, I'm not sure quite how useful it is, but I'm still very impressed
I think it's certainly a step in an interesting direction. Reminds me of from The Time Machine (which regardless of what most people say I still think was an ok movie)
I'll be interested to see what the site is like in a year or two.

Oh, and what's the longest article you've found on it so far?

[Wolfgang of Borg]

Ha yes! Vox! (Best character in that entire movie.) I thought the same thing but feared the reference might be too obscure.

I see qwiki as potentially useful, assuming you can configure the voice (i normally listen to voice stuff at accelerated speed) and it gets some kind of speech recognition feature (if i had time to *type* a query then i'd probably prefer to just read teh full article). But this could kill as a smartphone app, when reading from the screen is fiddly and annoying.

EDIT: Ooh and what about news? Having mefi, greader or reddit read aloud by a robot would be neat.