Italian Wikipedia is now added to global travellers audio guide. Thanks to Acapela text to speech, the written information is automatically vocalized, providing travellers with easy listening descriptions of hundreds of thousands of tourist attractions - now for those who speak Italian or learn it.

(TRAVPR.COM) RUSSIA  - ^15th July 2010 - Toozla LLC added Italian language to an audio guide based on Wikipedia – called Wikistream. Travellers can now access to more than hundred thousand descriptions of tourist attractions in Italian, what extends live guides in English and Russian. The highly technically advanced Toozla guide incorporates Acapela’s state-of-the-art text-to-speech engine.

In total, Wikipedia contains descriptions of more than a million geographical locations – and rising.

To use the Toozla service, tourists just need to install a small, free application on their modern smartphone. Their mobile must be capable of determining its location (i.e. it must have a GPS module). However, Toozla keeps all complex technical goings-on hidden from the user, to allow tourists to concentrate on enjoying their travels, rather than poring over tiny letters on the screen of their phone. Supported devices: Android, iPhone, Java ME (i.e. Nokia, Motorola and SonyEricsson).

A key characteristic of the Toozla guide operates on a similar principle to Wikipedia: any user can supplement the cumulative body of knowledge by creating an audio comment. The mobile application has a facility for recording speech. A few seconds after it is recorded, the user’s spoken comment is anchored to the location where it was created, and all other users of the service can then listen to it.
“This means an endless audio guide can be created for every corner of the Earth. Italian tourists will feel more at home in unfamiliar cities – because they will receive all the cumulative knowledge available about each place they visit, the moment they arrive there,” explains Alexei Cherenkov, director of Toozla. “English is an international language in many countries, but what's the pleasure to listen audio guide in native language!”

At present Toozla offers a number of central “streams”, some free, and some available for a fee: a weather service, professional multilingual audio guides, and the new Wikistream. Work is already underway to make more global streams available.

Because Toozla is a platform, access to the system can be licensed (whitelabeled) to companies (for example car hire or hotel companies). In addition, content partners can create their own (audio and text) guides, which they can provide to mobile phone users at low cost, because the software needed has already been developed.

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