Okko in Speech » amazon http://www.okkoblog.com Working with speech and language technology Thu, 29 Sep 2011 12:37:20 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Kindle Speech Synthesis http://www.okkoblog.com/2009/02/26/kindle-speech-synthesis/ http://www.okkoblog.com/2009/02/26/kindle-speech-synthesis/#comments Thu, 26 Feb 2009 13:35:00 +0000 Okko http://okkoblog.com/blog/?p=50 News about speech and language technology tend to be an in-industry affair, interesting largely to those who need and use it on a daily basis or those who produce (develop or market) it. Every so often however, mainstream news surface that raise issues of broad interest. Google’s efforts with speech recognition are an example of this. Last month, Amazon’s Kindle 2 e-book reader created a buzz with its text-to-speech “audio book” functionality.

The underlying issue is that Amazon is selling e-books, which can be listened to using speech synthesis, without owning the rights to produce audio book versions. The Authors’s Guild argues that this undermines the lucrative audio book market. While it is arguable that a synthesized voice is comparable to the experience of listening to a well-produced audio book, Amazon decided not to fight this one out.

What do you think? Can synthesized audio books provide an experience comparable to real voice productions?

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