Speakapedia is an app that can turn Wikipedia articles into podcasts. It can be used to browse Wikipedia and convert the text inside an article into an audio file by using the Mac OS X's text-to-speech. The converted files are automatically added to iTunes from where you can send them to any device that syncs with it.
This application is really easy to use and it browses Wikipedia very well. The first thing you have to do is find the article that you want to convert into a podcast. When this article has been loaded, all you really need to do is click on the "Speak It" button. A new window will be displayed. It will list all the sections of the article, and how many words each of those contains. By default, all the sections are selected, but you can unselect them by unchecking a box next to them. When you are done, simply click on "Import to iTunes" and the process will start.
If you are not looking for a specific article, you can use the "Random" feature, which will load a random article for you. You can click on the button as many times as you want.
Browsing Wikipedia on this app is a very nice experience, so if you get tired of the podcasts or the system voice is annoying, you can simply use this as a desktop client for Wikipedia.
v1.1 [Oct 2, 2010]
- Added search history drop down menu for the toolbar search box.
- Added browser text sizing menu items to the View menu.
- Current article title is now displayed on main window title bar.
- Added "Copy Current Page URL" menu item to allow the URL of the Wikipedia article to be copied to the clipboard.
- Improved error reporting screen for Web errors when browsing Wikipedia.
- Articles are now padded with a small amount of silence so that the move between sections is more noticeable.
- During the Speakapedia free trial, the window title now show trial expiry information.
- Rearranged the spacing of the default toolbar to be slightly clearer.
- Many more enhancements.
