Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
And before <em> was a thing, nobody complained that <i> was not read correctly.
|
They complained the TTS was robotic and lacked emotion. I was surprised by the TTS on the Kindle DXG. It was worst than my DOS TTS system, which could also have markup. Curiously TTS on my Android 6 Huawei (bought cheap NOS last year) using Pocket book on Android is better than the TTS on my Android 10 tablet or Android 11 phone (all using Google Speech engine and Pocketbook). The Huawei phone comes with an alternate speech engine which is maybe slightly better than Google's install.
Maybe Google are downgrading the Android one because they have a new TTS for making audio books for sale from epubs? I've not tried that. I'm sceptical it can compete with a half decent <em>experienced</em> human reader.
TTS has improved since the stupid HTML release that depreciated <i> and <b> and the next release after that admitted you need both <i> and <em> as well as <b> and <strong> because most textual bold and italic in English is just visual. But other languages do need <em> and <strong> and English sometimes need it.
HTML does now have both a lot of historic tags and newer tags that are more to do with web pages than ebooks. Some historic tags were because there was no CSS. Later someone decided then they can be used semantically.