I really want a Kindle but keep thinking that Apple or some other company is going to come out with something way better. By the way, if you have a Kindle, you can read this blog on it. Only thing is, Amazon still hasn't corrected the listing of my blog. It's still listed as On the Trail With Barack Obama, the name of the blog during campaign season.
But if the Kindle, which not only displays the news but also speaks it with a computerized voice, is ever to be the savior of print media, it needs to bone up on its pronunciation.
In particular, the voice of the Kindle mispronounces two important words that show up often in the pages of newspapers: “Barack” (the device rhymes it with “black”) and “Obama” (sounds like “Alabama”).
The science behind computerized voice features has come a long way, but apparently still has a ways to go.
“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 latest version of the Kindle was unveiled Wednesday at a press conference in Manhattan and has a big screen aimed at newspaper readers.
When asked about the error in pronouncing the president’s name, Jeffrey P. Bezos, chief executive of Amazon.com, said, with his trademark laugh, “that’s unfortunate.” NYT
Apparently the pronunciation has since been fixed:
he next day, an Amazon spokesman, Andrew Herdener, wrote in an e-mail message that Nuance Communications, the Massachusetts-based company that licenses its text-to-speech engine to Amazon for the Kindle, had added the correct pronunciation of the president’s name.
“Nuance has updated its dictionary, which we plan to include in an upcoming wireless update to Kindle devices,” he wrote.
