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Unable to listen to spoken version of the article on Android
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Description

Problem
There is currently no ability for Android app users to access audio for articles that contain a spoken audio version.
Highly recommended article for testing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu

Proposed design solutions
1. Show audio icon and "Listen to article" below lead image inline with map/similar pages/page issues if present.

map and pronounce-b-04.png (1×770 px, 767 KB)

The icon is called "volume up" in the Material icon set:
https://www.google.com/design/icons/#ic_volume_up

2. Include access to audio in the 'External links' section of the article
An audio player is also included in this section of an article with a spoken version on Web, Mobile Web and the iOS app.
This is something we could implement as well as design proposal 1 (adding an icon or similar at the top of the article).

Event Timeline

Dbrant raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.
Dbrant updated the task description. (Show Details)
Dbrant moved this task to Product Backlog on the Wikipedia-Android-App-Backlog board.
Dbrant subscribed.
Dbrant triaged this task as Medium priority.Oct 14 2015, 1:40 PM
Dbrant updated the task description. (Show Details)
Dbrant set Security to None.

[continuing the discussion from T114524]

How will it actually appear when the article has disambiguation links and/or issues (i.e. will it overflow onto two lines)? I'm kind of worried that we'd be pushing the lead section down more (thus exposing less of the article text), when we've worked so hard to make sure that the text is at the very top. Would it be possible to use more of the lead image real estate to contain these buttons?

Regarding audio playback:

  • For the pronunciation of the title, since it's a relatively short sound clip, I think it's OK to just play the audio ourselves in the background, with no controls.
  • For the spoken version of the article, I also think it's OK to bounce the user to an external player app, and allow it to play the file. That way we wouldn't have to implement our own playback controls.

For spoken articles there could be multiple audio files (the article could be split into several parts). The design for when the button is pressed needs to take that into account.

Would be really nice if the server provided a playlist file (.m3u) , too. Then we could just use the playlist file to send to the external audio player.

RHo renamed this task from Add button to play spoken version of the article. to Missing ability to listen to spoken version of the article on Android.Nov 15 2016, 1:06 PM
RHo renamed this task from Missing ability to listen to spoken version of the article on Android to Unable to listen to spoken version of the article on Android.
RHo updated the task description. (Show Details)
LGoto lowered the priority of this task from Medium to Low.Oct 13 2020, 4:43 PM