RhinoSpike - a volunteer reading exchange site

[c_redman]

RhinoSpike is a site where you can make a request for anyone to read aloud a text in a language of your choosing. Someone who is a native speaker can take up your request, recording their reading of it and attaching it to the item. More than one person can read the same item, each with their own self-declared accent.

In addition to making requests, you can also respond to the requests of others with your own recording. This will "move your own Audio Requests ahead in the queue". I'm not sure what this means, as the total number of requests on the whole site isn't too large so far (I think the site itself has only started to catch on in the last few days).

My own impression is that the layout needs some work (there is a lot of scrolling because the data is too spread out, which also makes it harder to browse). But it's a great idea. Having many different accents is certainly useful, and it's also nice to listen to speech not from professional broadcasters. As the amount of content on the site grows, I expect there will be a wide range of different types of texts to choose from (it's mostly news posts at this point).