Wikipedia to store famous voices for posterity, starting with Stephen Fry's
Virtually everyone in the UK (and many an Engadget reader) is familiar with Stephen Fry's iconic voice, but will anyone remember it in, say, 50 years? He certainly hopes so, but just to be sure, Wikipedia has recorded it for posterity and pegged it to his bio page. The plan is to have a large number of well-known types do the same so that readers will know "what (those folks) sound like and how they pronounce their names." Though there are only a handful of contributors so far (including US astronaut Charlie Duke and British peer Baron Knight of Weymouth), the effort will be soon be bulked up by some "500 to 1,000" celebrity clips thanks to the BBC. As tat for its tit, the Beeb hopes to one day use the Wikipedia archive to power a real-time, open-source voice-recognition engine -- and perhaps add some VIP pizzazz to its own collection of voices.
