Friday, September 23, 2011

Amazon event on 28th

I just heard through one of my powerful sources that amazon is having an event on Wednesday 28th September, to announce new Kindle(s).

Kewl. I hope it/they will have some nice surprises and unique features, rather than just be another Android device with a slick Amazon interface painted on. I'm sure it'll sell well even if it hasn't, but I wouldn't buy one, I already have three, gasp, three Android devices, a 5-inch, a 7-inch, and a 10-inch. (Dell Streak, Samsung GT first gen, Motorola Xoom.) Oh, plus a very cheap seven-incher, Tabtech or such.

In other news, Al Gore has apparently made a deliberate plug for new iPhones coming out in October. I guess *he* won't get fired though, being on Apple's board. Interesting that he used the plural word "iphones"... might mean more than one size of iPhone. Seems unlikely Apple making a 5-inch iPhone, but that's one I probably would get if they do.

Thursday, September 22, 2011

The quality of Kindle's voice

I think the Kindle 3's reading-aloud tech has been bypassed, and I hope it's upgraded in the next generation.
In particularly, I find it to be an egregious error that the software does not know to make a pause after a full stop, and make it sound like a new sentence after! It seems to simply ignore full stops, very odd. But it does pause by a dash, for some reason. So for example, the segment:

"That's why we like e-books. In Arabia it is well known..." 

is read like:

"That's why we like e. Books in Arabia it is well known..."

Not great.       :-)

I hope that they've kept the read-aloud feature in the upcoming Android Kindle, and that the necessarily more powerful processor has allowed them to include better speech software.