Immersive Articles

Firefly articles include topics from subjects like Fundamental Sciences, Plants and Animals, Breakthroughs, Earth and Space, and Climate and Environment. There are PDF versions available for the underserved kids to read, or, if they are visually impaired or still learning to read English, they can listen along to the article.

The writing and recordings of these articles used to be done by Amrita-Seattle volunteers, but due to a shortage of help, this process was automated by Aditya. The articles are now written using a GPT-4 based custom chatbot. The audio is created using neural text-to-speech powered by APIs in Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services implemented through Python code to generate minutes of audio in seconds. This provides the audio on the website. On the app, to save space, the voice is generated offline using on-device processing and the Apple AVSpeechSynthesizer API.