Hi all,
For some time, with some friends we have been playing with a
prototype that makes it possible to search content from Mediawiki by
sending text messages (SMS) from your phone. You send your search
term to to the server and after receiving the text message the server
(Asterisk) makes a call back to you and plays the audio content (if
there is audio) or text to speech will read you the text content
found fro the corresponding article. During the call you can navigate
in the article with the DTMF/touchtone key presses. For instance you
can jump to next section and record audio to any of the sections.
Right now we do not have the energy needed to develop the prototype
further. For this reason we would be happy to give it as a project
for some developer interested in to take a leadership of it.
The development site is in here:
http://dev.mobiled.org/trac/
A blog and background information about the project is here:
http://www.mobiled.org
Please, let me know if you (or you know someone who) could be
interested in to work with this.
We are happy to keep on hosting the development site (http://
dev.mobiled.org/trac/), the SVN and give all support one may need to
get on working with this.
The prototype is in a stage that one can set it up, but the whole
thing is not packaged in a way that other people could take it in use
in any easy way. There are also some specific hardware requirements
and you also needs a phone line to make it work.
So, for what one can use the audio mobile wiki?
We have tested it with Wikipedia content and in a way it works. You
can very check pretty fast some basic facts with it when not close to
web. For instance, if you just want to know some basic things about
some country the Wikipedia format works for this purpose pretty well
also when used with this.
We also have made some school pilots where students were providing
content to the wiki in form of "podcasts" they recorded with the
phone. It was fun and also worked out pretty well.
RIght now we are writing a paper claiming that most likely the mobile
audio could work nicely as some kind of craigslist in places where
there aren't internet connections but mobile phones. One could have
in a wiki server local news, classified, jobs, housing, for sale etc.
- all content mainly provided by the people with their phone and by
recording their ads to the server under the right search term.
Why we think that this is important?
Most people in the world do not have an internet connection. Most
people have mobile phones - those simple ones with text message and
voice.
Why we are no more interested in to develop this?
We are, but we simply do not have the right skills set: very limited
knowhow of Mediawiki and Asterisk. From our side the MobilED research
- we are a research group - is pretty much done. What we did was
contextual inquiry, participatory design, prototype development and
piloting of the idea with real people. We also have reported this
work in various forums. However, event with this announcement of
looking for a main software developer for the open source project we
are not going to leave the MobilED totally behind. We still want to
be involved in it and do more our kind of research when there is a
need for it.
Best regards,
- Teemu