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Pediaphon is a free service by Andreas Bischoff that's been around for some time, but we haven't mentioned it here on Mashable until now. What Pediaphon does is generate mp3 audio files from Wikipedia articles using speech synthesis. Operated at the University of Hagen in Germany, the mp3 audio files can then be taken with you to listen to on your mp3 player, listened to on your phone, played with Windows Media Player or played directly in your browser using Java.
Given the recent activity that's going on with projects being spun off from Wikipedia in various fashions, we thought now would be a good time to give Pediaphon a mention, especially since it has recently added a French version. Yesterday we reported on Wikimedia's collaborative media project that Kaltura has just joined, which is looking to offer up its content for use with other media outlets, as well as creating media to be used within its own wikis. The outreach and partnerships involved with these initiatives are important fork Wikimedia's growth and future efforts.
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And as Pediaphon is contributing to the Spoken Wikipedia WikiProject, it's clear that this tool is lending itself to the overall improvement and diversification of free, collaborative information. So how well does it work? Enter in a search term and you'll get an audio recording of the Wikipedia entry being read aloud to you. It very much sounds like the machine speech-synthesis tool that it is. I did a search for Hugh Hefner and found it rather enjoyable, given the monotone speech and the subject of my search.