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

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

#21

Post by joshumax »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #20

It seems like there's a gap for a mapping application focussed around discovery. Google maps and the like expect you to know what you are looking for. I want an application that will show me what interesting towns, villages, churches, museums, beaches etc. there are around me whilst travelling. Does anyone know if something like this already exists? I have some ideas for how I would implement it myself but I thought…

You might want to check out Niantic's (the same people who made Ingress) app called Field Trip[1]. It seems to fulfill a lot of what you're asking for.

1: https://www.fieldtripper.com/m/index.html

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

#22

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

ravenstine wrote: post #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…

Bravo for considering the potential impact before building.

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

#23

Post by eythian »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #20

It seems like there's a gap for a mapping application focussed around discovery. Google maps and the like expect you to know what you are looking for. I want an application that will show me what interesting towns, villages, churches, museums, beaches etc. there are around me whilst travelling. Does anyone know if something like this already exists? I have some ideas for how I would implement it myself but I thought…

This is different but in the same vein: https://flyovercountry.io/

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

#24

Post by dolzenko »

I want the same for street names I'm driving, is this available? E.g. short bio of the personality the street is named for. Given the track is known it can even select longer/shorter versions depending on how long you're going to stay on the given street :)

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

#25

Post by zulln »

ravenstine wrote: post #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…

How do you plan to get the data? Assuming you took the idea that far.

Sounds interesting indeed, and I have not thought about it for long, but I doubt there is any public official database for it?

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

#26

Post by kaybe »

cramforce wrote: post #8
rockostrich wrote: post #2

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.

Are you checking for spoken article coverage? There are not a lot, sadly, but some places are covered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Spoken_articles

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

#27

Post by alexpatin »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #20

It seems like there's a gap for a mapping application focussed around discovery. Google maps and the like expect you to know what you are looking for. I want an application that will show me what interesting towns, villages, churches, museums, beaches etc. there are around me whilst travelling. Does anyone know if something like this already exists? I have some ideas for how I would implement it myself but I thought…

There's definitely a gap here. I've attempted to use Google Maps while cruising or walking around a new city and glance at what's around me every few blocks, but I certainly crave something that's going to recommend new places for me to check when I am traveling.

Considering Google has so much location history of its users, along its Places data, one would think that creating a recommendation engine for travelers would be fairly trivial for them. I would not be surprised if they are already working on this.

That said, I would enjoy and potentially prefer an alternative solution to one they could provide.

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

#28

Post by Too »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #20

It seems like there's a gap for a mapping application focussed around discovery. Google maps and the like expect you to know what you are looking for. I want an application that will show me what interesting towns, villages, churches, museums, beaches etc. there are around me whilst travelling. Does anyone know if something like this already exists? I have some ideas for how I would implement it myself but I thought…

Google earth is quite good for this purpose. Strangely this is not merged with google maps.

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

#29

Post by zedderled »

This is a bit off topic but is there an app that takes you to your destination with the most scenic routes? Currently, Waze and Google Maps gives me the route with the least traffic but one time I took a Waze route through VA which was absolutely gorgeous. The only way I can make this happen is taking the opposite of the GPS and then letting it guide me through the backways.
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