Wiki Radio: The thrilling sound of random Wikipedia

https://www.monkeon.co.uk/wikiradio/

155•if-curious•7mo ago

Comments

mbil•7mo ago

From the title I expected this would be like talk radio (like NotebookLM style) discussion of random wiki pages.

tasty_freeze•7mo ago

That sounds like a great idea for a sleep aid: have an AI narrate random wikipedia pages. Maybe it could even allow you to specify topics you have no interest in so it doesn't accidentally pick a topic that might grab your interest.

ivape•7mo ago

Would you pay for it?

drmajormccheese•7mo ago

Yes

paularmstrong•7mo ago

No need for an AI. Text-to-speech (TTS) is by far good enough and much easier on CPU/GPU and the environment.

vorpalhex•7mo ago

Using an "AI" (LLM) enhanced TTS adds in tone and other markers to let the underlying TTS sound much more natural. You can then double down with an ML tuned TTS to get a more natural voice.

guerrilla•7mo ago

What's an example of that? Anytging I can run locally?

theblazehen•7mo ago

A paid product, but https://elevenlabs.io/ does it pretty well. There is some work on open source versions you can run locally, they work reasonably well, but I haven't kept up with the FOSS field in several months, so I'm unsure which is currently best

saretup•7mo ago

There are some really good open source TTS models out there now. Dia 1.6B or OpenAudio S1 are good options, and you can always check whichever models are trending on huggingface: https://huggingface.co/models?pipeline_tag=text-to-speech

squeaky-clean•7mo ago

NotebookLM's audio mode doesn't just read out the given text, it creates a podcast format with 2 hosts where one will ask questions and the other will answer, and go back and forth in a discussion style.

ethan_smith•7mo ago

That would be a fascinating next iteration - combining these random audio clips with LLM-generated summaries or discussions of the Wikipedia articles they're sourced from.

RheingoldRiver•7mo ago

Why does it play an artificial voice saying "Number 9" over and over in between clips in Revolution 9 mode? it's super annoying especially given the clips are shorter

But this is really cool! I've gotten some animal sounds, weather sounds, music, a small kid talking about a soccer match in Spanish, "evil laugh", political speeches in several languages, and a telephone ringing. only pressed skip a couple times for some really unpleasant noises

martyvis•7mo ago

It's a reference to the Beatles song Revolution Number 9 which includes a lot of clips like that. It does get old pretty quickly here.

guerrilla•7mo ago

Uh wow. This is actual bubble-bursting technology. I love this. Getting StumbleUpon vibes. Also, crazy that so many of these things are actually good... Maybe humanity is not so bad after all? Hmm. Food for thought. :D

username135•7mo ago

Give it time

laszlojamf•7mo ago

I love this, and I don’t mean to throw any shade on it, but this is kind of thing I’d the best to come out of the ”vibe coding” revolution. I don’t know if this was vibe coded, but what I mean to say is that there are a million things that you just never get around to doing, and LLMs help you to actually _realize_ little cool ideas like this.

jjice•7mo ago

Hopefully the "small internet" gets has a resurgence of goofy websites due to reduced development time. Boilerplate gets super annoying, but LLMs don't procrastinate the way I do.

hofrogs•7mo ago

The implication of this comment is so insulting and unnecessary

Tokkemon•7mo ago

Number 9. Number 9. Number 9....

LoganDark•7mo ago

Two Number 9s, a Number 9 large, a Number 6 with extra dip...

saretup•7mo ago

I get why you added the static noise sound between clips but that gets annoying real quick.

booleandilemma•7mo ago

I think it's nice.

hofrogs•7mo ago

It is extremely loud compared to the main audio for some reason, making the site unusable

ghastmaster•7mo ago

I skipped 2 and landed on the 3rd audio piece and loved it. I dunno why. It is totally my jam for the time being. lost the wiki link, but here is the youtube link. "lil pants" :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxcXVqgKd9c

WTF: That link landed me on something else after this comment that I am totally loving as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPu4XfWkRvc&list=OLAK5uy_kNl...

Never know what rabbit hole you'll find yourself in with HN. Bless y'all.

komali2•7mo ago

Very cool project, I'm jealous I didn't think of it!

mycatisblack•7mo ago

Cool!

Had some Japanese song pass by and all the letters were vertically arranged (as is tradition), which made it impossible to find out what artist it was.

albert_e•7mo ago

The first track i got was an audio summary of "philosophical razors"

I assumed each "track" is an 5-minute audio summary (LLM+TTS) of a random text ARTICLE from Wikipedia.

Apparently I was mistaken and these are actually random MEDIA uploaded to Wikipedia.

Now I have an idea for a weekend project :)

EDIT:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Philosophical_Razors...

Apparently it was not a summary but the full article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor

EDIT2:

Index of all spoken articles on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Spoken_articles

EDIT3:

Here is my 10-minute vibe-coded implementation of "Wikipedia Radio" for spoken articles (no LLM or TTS at runtime here) -- https://d3rfhwexohg7ag.cloudfront.net/wikipedia-radio.html

jmhammond•7mo ago

Thank you for making what many of us thought this would be! It’s pretty fun

qgin•7mo ago

This is awesome and a great way to come up with ideas

btbuildem•7mo ago

Ahh I thought it would be TTS reading of various wikipedia articles and I got excited :/

washmyelbows•7mo ago

wow - I've quickly found 2 songs that are better than anything I've discovered in weeks

jamilton•7mo ago

A lot of the music seems to be reuploaded from freemusicarchive.org, hadn't heard of that before but it seems cool.

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