Lend Your Voice with WeChat
This series of articles are brought to you by WeChat – the new way to connect.
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One of the world’s fastest growing social communication apps is using technology to power a good cause. WeChat, owned by China’s Tencent, has created The Voice Donor project to help ensure the blind or those with low vision don’t miss out on their favourite books.
There are more than 11,600 people who are blind or have low vision in New Zealand but in China, however, the number jumps to 12.5 million. While hundreds of new books are released in the country every day, many are not made accessible to the blind. WeChat wants to change that by offering its users the chance to help create audiobooks. The company placed special books in bookstores around the country prompting shoppers to get involved. The books were blank, except for a QR code inviting them to donate their voice. After scanning the QR code and picking a book category, WeChat sent the reader a snippet of a book to be recorded using the app’s “Hold to Talk” feature.
Because each recording was unique, WeChat developed an Intelligent Operation System to stitch each submission together. It scored the clips on fluency, clarity and other factors such as background noise and misread works and compiled them into audio books, which were also made available on WeChat.
In only a few months, the voices of more than 200,00 WeChat users had helped create ten audiobooks. While the Voice Donor is currently only available in Chinese, people all over the world who can read Chinese are welcome to donate their voices. If you want to get involved, just open WeChat and scan the QR code below to follow the Voice Donor official account.
