Thank you, everyone, for your positive comments on my post yesterday. Would anyone care to add concerns to our list? Over the next few days, I'm going to look around on the Amazon.com Web site to determine the best place to post our concerns. There is, of course, the feedback page, and that might be a good place to start; but there may well be other options on the corporate pages. I'm also waiting to see if Nan Hawthorne will chime in on this thread.
Craig On 2/13/2012 2:06 PM, Jim Fettgather wrote:
You have done a great job of concisely stating the problems with the speech implementation on the Kindle. Interesting that on other platforms, such as Ibooks on the iPhone, with the same or very similar TTS, this anomaly is not present, all pauses are natural and correctly placed. I am sure in favor of your suggestion, as it sure seems high time for a software upgrade to address the shortcomings of speech on Kindle. Thanks. On 2/13/12, Craig Werner<craig_werner@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:Greetings to the list. I have been using my Kindle Keyboard 3G for about three months now, and I have some questions I'd like to pose to the group. First, I find that reading at the "faster" speed causes me to lose some words and to be confused by sentence parsing erorrs more often than when I read at the default speed. Have you found that reading facility at the faster speed improves with time? I suspect the answer is "yes" since this has been true of my experience with my screen reader. Second, there are a number of quirks that the TTS option displays, such as a lack of pause between sections of a book, a failure to raise vocal inflection after many interrogative sentences, and a failure to pause between the speech of one character and the interruption by another. The lack of pause can perhaps be best illustrated by a made-up volley of conversation between two characters: "Do you like peaches?" "Only if they're in cans." The TTS reads this exchange so that it sounds like a single question spoken by one person: "Do you like peaches only if they're in cans?" This sentence makes syntactical sense as a question; however, that is clearly not the intent of the writer. The bottom line: Should we compile a list of these kinds of anomalies and use them to fashion a cogent, diplomatic, yet forceful query to Amazon about possibly improving the TTS? I suspect we're talking about problems embedded in the Nuance RealSpeak engine, and I don't know the degree--if any--that Amazon is in a position to bargain with Nuance. Thanks very much for any thoughts. Craig nd then figure out how to direct an organized, diplomatic, yet
