Hay-ree-et Bee-char Sto-wee
The Kindle 2 and the Kindle DX pronounces “Barack Obama” as “Bay-rack Oh-bamma,” slightly embarrassing for a device designed to display and read newspapers. An NYT story find this to be slightly funny but, as we all know, text-to-speech has been a fail party for years, no matter what the Authors Guild says.
The technology is very advanced; everyone has the memory of the Stephen Hawking voice, which was very robotic,” said Patrick Dexter, the director of business development at Cepstral, a Pittsburgh company that does such work and has licensed its technology to Google. “The goal right now is to get a voice that sounds almost indistinguishable from a real person.”
The system, provided by Nuance, will update its dictionary to reflect the Presidential Pronunciation.
If you’re going to have a goal, why shoot for “almost”?
The Kindle is geared towards most english words in the public domain. We have a new president with a name like no others. I am sure the Kindle would stumble over Ahmadinejad or almost any French word. Are we expected to change our complete Lexicon for a singe aberration ? Amazon’s Besos should have explained that the read-to-me function is intended as a convenience tool, not as a replacement for human intelligence.
Sounds to me like it’s a very intelligent device. I don’t want to say that name either.
As far as Milaq’s last statement is concerned – “Amazon’s Besos should have explained that the read-to-me function is intended as a convenience tool, not as a replacement for human intelligence.” – that’s true but it’s sad that something like that even needs to be explained, maybe it’s because there is not much human intelligence left.