The Amazon Kindle, an electronic reader, has been lavished with praise by hopeful newspaper and book executives who say they believe it has the potential to do for newspapers and books what the iPod did for music.
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.”
The 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.
Apparently, the matter was a simple oversight. “These things happen a lot,” said Steve Chambers, an executive at Nuance, which also licenses its technology to Apple, Amtrak, United Airlines and Bank of America. “It’s not even considered a bug. If it encounters a word it has never seen, it approaches it almost like a kid, phonetically.”
Kindle owners in Boston, however, may want to avoid the sports pages for now. The Kindle pronounces “Celtics” with an initial hard “c.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/business/media/08kindle.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
