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Old 01-24-2013, 10:55 AM   #1
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Amazon buys Ivona

I haven´t seen it here (excuse me if it has been posted already) so here's the news: http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/24/amazon-ivona/

Amazon has apparently bought Ivona which is a company which specialices in text to speech. They have pretty good voices and they're used in some ereaders among other devices.
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Old 01-24-2013, 11:26 AM   #2
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I haven´t seen it here (excuse me if it has been posted already) so here's the news: http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/24/amazon-ivona/

Amazon has apparently bought Ivona which is a company which specialices in text to speech. They have pretty good voices and they're used in some ereaders among other devices.

Wow. Ivona has some of the best text to speech software / apps in the industry. I imagine this will shape future Amazon tablet releases.
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Old 01-24-2013, 11:39 AM   #3
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Hopefully, they won't limit Ivona TTS only to Kindle Fires and it will remain on the Google Play store for the users of other Android devices as well.
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Old 01-24-2013, 02:11 PM   #4
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Hopefully, they won't limit Ivona TTS only to Kindle Fires and it will remain on the Google Play store for the users of other Android devices as well.
I hope not. I currently use it on my tablet as it's miles ahead of Google's text to speech engine. Even if they don't remove it from Play Store, there might not be any additional voices made available.
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Old 01-24-2013, 06:29 PM   #5
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Does Ivona product have emotional tone of human voice or does it still sound like a robot or a lame imitation of human voice?
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Old 01-24-2013, 07:23 PM   #6
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Does Ivona product have emotional tone of human voice or does it still sound like a robot or a lame imitation of human voice?
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Old 01-24-2013, 07:34 PM   #7
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Also, go to their website and sample 8 different American English voices. In all, they have 42 voices in various languages; male and female.
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Old 01-24-2013, 08:45 PM   #8
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Wow, if they brought TTS back to eink kindles, or maybe to the kindle phone, that would be awesome.
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Old 01-24-2013, 09:16 PM   #9
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Hopefully, they won't limit Ivona TTS only to Kindle Fires and it will remain on the Google Play store for the users of other Android devices as well.
+1

I'd be lost without it on my tablet. My K3 is still doing great, but that won't last forever.
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Old 01-25-2013, 09:09 AM   #10
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It never ended well for the users when one of the big guys bought a good multi-platform product.
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Old 01-25-2013, 10:00 AM   #11
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I a noob when talking about TTS and I seriously wondering what is the use of such a thing!

I'm not saying it's useless, but I can't figure how I would use this in my everyday life. For you, TTS users, are you using it to hear the story like bed time story for adult? I'm confuse!

Please, teach me!
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Old 01-25-2013, 10:26 AM   #12
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I a noob when talking about TTS and I seriously wondering what is the use of such a thing!

I'm not saying it's useless, but I can't figure how I would use this in my everyday life. For you, TTS users, are you using it to hear the story like bed time story for adult? I'm confuse!

Please, teach me!
I'm not a TTS user (I don't do audiobooks either; I can't really focus when I listen), but from what I've gathered, people use TTS for different reasons, largely for the same reasons why some people like audiobooks.

Not every book has an audiobook version (and audiobooks are often expensive), so TTS is handy for those others, for people who prefer to listen to books, either for reasons to do with eyesight problems or during chores, car trips, on treadmill in gym, etc. I've also seen people say that sometimes e.g. autistic kids even prefer TTS to audiobooks.

In any case, the major reason is, I'd think, that (a) not every book has an audiobook version (and don't forget personal documents, fanfic, various free public domain books etc), and (b) even if an official / professionally narrated audiobook exists, not everyone wants to pay twice to have the same book in text and audio. And not everyone minds the computerised voice.
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Old 01-25-2013, 10:32 AM   #13
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I'm really big into audiobooks and I see no use for TTS in my life.
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Old 01-25-2013, 04:39 PM   #14
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Note that this is not just for reading ebooks, but is essential for 'accessibility' of the device as well. It can probably help with learning a new language also (though you might wind up with some strange inflections!). Probably most people use it for GPS navigation, though Fire isn't able to do that.

I like to have TTS capability with the reading apps I use. And it is fun to have a variety of voices to choose from. ePub3/CSS has some markup for controlling aspects of speech synthesis 'such as pronunciation, prosody and voice characteristics'. Maybe Amazon can borrow some of that. For example, this would let the narrator's voice to be different than words spoken by various characters.

http://idpf.org/epub/30/spec/epub30-...w.html#sec-tts
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Old 01-25-2013, 06:49 PM   #15
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I like to have TTS capability with the reading apps I use. And it is fun to have a variety of voices to choose from. ePub3/CSS has some markup for controlling aspects of speech synthesis 'such as pronunciation, prosody and voice characteristics'. Maybe Amazon can borrow some of that. For example, this would let the narrator's voice to be different than words spoken by various characters.

http://idpf.org/epub/30/spec/epub30-...w.html#sec-tts
That's pretty cool that they even thought of adding this to the standard!!
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