Wiki-to-Speech from ODP versions available. Call for presentations.

[John Graves]

Next weekend, 23-25 September 2011, is Startup Weekend here in Auckland. Wiki-to-Speech will be pitched as an idea for a startup business, building on the new direct to video output capability.

The overall goal of Wiki-to-Speech has always been to harness the collaborative efforts of educators to create a resource of learning materials which rivals the reference materials at Wikipedia in scope. Khan Academy has shown what one teacher can do (2,400 videos, viewed 75 million times). So, based on a suggestion from Kiwi PyCon 2011, Wiki-to-Speech can now output to video. A slide show like this:

Wiki-to-Speech slideshow

is also output to a video like this:

Document Classification Using the Natural Language Toolkit

The authoring process still involves a two-step save -- the presentation (with speaker notes) needs to be saved in the Open Document Presentation (.odp) format and as slide images (.jpg on Windows / .png on Mac) -- before the Wiki-to-Speech from ODP utility can be run. A new installer for the Windows version of this utility makes it easier to get started. Look for the latest featured downloads for Mac and Windows at http://wikitospeech.org

If you create a Wiki-to-Speech presentation, please make a posting about it.