AskWiki voice search for WikipediaPosted by Norris Have on February 25th, 2021 Speech recognition is currently very much in vogue, which is why apps are a dime a dozen. The clones of Apple's Siri program are also increasing. But sometimes you just want simple information, no frills. I personally think the AskWiki app is very good for this . The program searches Wikipedia using the user's voice. Here you can also have the app query special properties, for example "Length Oder" or "Area Germany". The corresponding line of text from the appropriate Wikipedia entry is then displayed directly.
However, the inquiries must not be too complex. “Distance moon to earth”, for example, overwhelmed the app. “Population of Germany”, “Alter Michael Schumacher” or “Höhe Zugspitze” worked perfectly as a command. A sample area in the lower part of the program provides further clues as to which questions the app can specifically answer. It is also interesting that the program shows its route, as it were, using the spoken command while searching through Wikipedia.
This also gives you a little insight into how such a speech recognition engine works. It's a shame that the app only works in portrait mode. The program can only display an extract of the text horizontally in a kind of zoom mode. In general, after entering the search, you have 4 icons to navigate through the program. A house leads you to the start screen, a flower shows pictures in the found Wikipedia article, three dots stand for calling up the complete article and finally the enlarge symbol.
When making the settings, the programmers paid a lot of attention to the acoustic characteristics. You can choose from predefined search tones and result tones. A timeout for the search time can also be specified. A log file, which saves the entered searches on the SD card, is also practical. You can even adapt the synonyms using an external editor, for example to add your own search terms. The app definitely has a lot of potential.
An update with more pre-defined search terms and a mode to view the results horizontally would be welcome improvements. With 2.3 MB, the program doesn't eat up too much memory either.
Download AskWiki (Android Market)
Google Play Store
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