Qwiki – View Video Presentations On Any Topic!

Gone are the days when finding information on some topic would mean a visit to the library. It’s the age of Wikipedia. But with the Wikipedia articles getting longer and our attention span becoming shorter, it seems another change is imminent. Qwiki is one such tool that might be helpful.

Qwiki aggregates information from various sources and presents it to the user in the form of a video. So, instead of a long, often boring article, you get a short, highly informative video.

The presentation is narrated by a computer generated female voice in American accent. It sounds pretty natural, though there are some problems in non-dictionary words or non-English words. Subtitles are provided to avoid confusion.

Qwiki Features

• Qwikis are computer generated with data mostly from Wikipedia and Wikimedia with some parts being from other sources.
• Qwiki covers a huge number of topics. The API page it says it covers more than 3 million. I tried searching for various topics and was surprised by the things already covered. From Hindi movies to Howrah Bridge to Chandni Chowk could be found.

• The Qwiki page has the Search box at the top, Qwiki at the centre and related Qwikis below that. There are no ads. Social sharing buttons are available at the top of the Qwiki.

• The seek bar has thumbnails that help find portions of the Qwiki so that you can quickly jump to any part of the Qwiki.

• There is a Related button below every Qwiki that displays a list of related Qwikis. Links to Wikipedia, YouTube, Fotopedia and Google search are also available at the end.

Qwikis load very quickly and I have not come across any buffering issues. There are some bugs or errors that come up, such as, in the Qwiki on Web server it says “below is the most recent statistics of the market share of the top web servers”. There is no such statistic.

That said Qwiki is a great tool for some quick learning. If you are looking to just get introduced to something new, then using Qwiki makes sense. Do try it out and drop in your comments.

Link: QWiki