An App that Reads from Wikipedia: Know Places While Driving

Malte UbI, Tech Lead for Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project builds an app that detects a user’s geolocation and matches it with relevant Wikipedia pages. The app reads out loud those articles to familiarize you with the places you are visiting. The app acts like a smart passenger who happens to know everything about the town – its history, culture and many other details.

UbI built this software on Glitch platform – a website that was started by Anil Dash, last year, to promote coders to build their own bite-sized web apps. The unnamed and purely customized app by UbI will work in Google Chrome, Firefox, and other browsers that support GPS and speech synthesis. The app will also allow users to click through for more interesting tidbits from nearby locales.

UbI told, “I made [the app] for myself because I frequently drive through places and was thinking it would be nice to learn more about my environment while I have nothing better to do sitting behind the steering wheel.”

However, some users commented on twitter that the app isn’t perfect. When users want to check for Vienna, Virginia articles regarding Vienna, Austria is shown and when asked about Cambridge, New York by default Cambridge in the United Kingdom is shown. The flaw could be most likely because these are the first articles that pop up when searched using the city names alone. And UbI welcomes users to suggest or develop patches to fix these issues.