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An app that reads Wikipedia to teach you about cities you’re driving through

theverge.com

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Re: An app that reads Wikipedia to teach you about cities you’re driving through

#3
A friend of mine and I, while on a road trip, thought it'd be cool if there was an app like the one described that tells you about what's grown in the fields and orchards you drive through out in the country. I decided against making it after reading articles about how there are actual orchard robbers and people who steal millions of dollars worth of almonds; I don't want to make it easier for criminals. But I still kind of hope someone else makes it because I'd enjoy it.

Re: An app that reads Wikipedia to teach you about cities you’re driving through

#5
Love seeing an app built on Glitch [1] getting press coverage from somewhere as big as The Verge!

As an American visiting Austria, I sympathize with the Vienna bug. Nearly walked to Virginia multiple times due to a miscommunication with Google Maps ;)

https://glitch.com/

Re: An app that reads Wikipedia to teach you about cities you’re driving through

#8

Seems like a cool, simple web app. The voice isn't great though. I would think that it's pretty easy to have a nicer computer generated voice nowadays, but I've never built something that needed to do text to speech so maybe not.

Author of the app here: The voice is whatever your browser on your device uses by default for speech synthesis. E.g. on an iPhone it may be Siri's default, on other platforms it is a different voice.

Re: An app that reads Wikipedia to teach you about cities you’re driving through

#9
post #7

I use http://wikimapia.org/ when traveling to find out about what's around me. Going around the US by train last year I passed a decommissioned ICBM launch site and a couple of Superfund/nuclear waste sites. Neat.

Shameless self-plug; I recently launched an app to help people discover and contribute interesting things about the places they go - https://www.r3d.city. Feedback greatly appreciated!
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