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geneven · 10-13-2009, 12:53 AM

Well, Harry, your Satnav probably has a limited vocab and so Ingrid is probably a real girl! The text-to-speech on the Kindle is also based on real people, but the vocabulary is NOT limited, so it's harder to have elegant voices. But I still say that the female Kindle voice, Samantha, is much better than the male voice.

I think that a lot of people who despise text-to-speech are mainly basing their opinions on memories of what text-to-speech used to sound like, or on FREE voices. These days, even the free voice that comes with my prerelease Windows 7 -- her name is Anna -- isn't that bad.

Here is what is great about text-to-speech produced by a computer: it gives you the thoughts of the author without the intervention of some actor. When you listen to a human reading, you are hearing a PERFORMANCE, an interpretation. You think the actor talked to Dickens before adopting a certain tone of voice? No, he didn't! He's just making it up. The computer makes no assumptions and just reads the material to you in the clearest way it can. It doesn't try to sell you on hearing the text the way it imagines it.

10-13-2009, 12:53 AM	#20
geneven Member Retired Posts: 124 Karma: 340 Join Date: Aug 2008 Device: Nokia N800, N810, Kindle 2	Well, Harry, your Satnav probably has a limited vocab and so Ingrid is probably a real girl! The text-to-speech on the Kindle is also based on real people, but the vocabulary is NOT limited, so it's harder to have elegant voices. But I still say that the female Kindle voice, Samantha, is much better than the male voice. I think that a lot of people who despise text-to-speech are mainly basing their opinions on memories of what text-to-speech used to sound like, or on FREE voices. These days, even the free voice that comes with my prerelease Windows 7 -- her name is Anna -- isn't that bad. Here is what is great about text-to-speech produced by a computer: it gives you the thoughts of the author without the intervention of some actor. When you listen to a human reading, you are hearing a PERFORMANCE, an interpretation. You think the actor talked to Dickens before adopting a certain tone of voice? No, he didn't! He's just making it up. The computer makes no assumptions and just reads the material to you in the clearest way it can. It doesn't try to sell you on hearing the text the way it imagines it.