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Apparently, according to a New York Times report, the voice of the Kindle has mispronounced president Barack Obama's name to make it sound like "Black" and "Alabama" for "Barak" and "Obama".
So there will be mild anomolies in innovative hi-tech consumer gadgets. But then take a look at the bright side of this enabling technology.
Nan Hawthorne, a successful historical novelist, was born with Stargardt's Disease, a form of macular degeneration that causes the deterioration of a person's vision over time. Nan has been partially blind her entire life; now with 20/1200 vision, she has learned to live with the disease but has had to constantly rely on others for help when reading and researching.
In fact, to accomplish this, she had to go through the laborious effort of mailing every research book she needed to a third party service that converted the lengthy tomes into spoken word in order for her to complete her research--a frustrating and time consuming endeavor.
Hawthorne has a Plustek BookReader V100, a reading device that has both text-to-speech and optical character recognition. She was impressed with the dramatic results she achieved even from her very first attempt.
"Now I am able to buy the books I need and read them whenever I want. It has dramatically changed my life," said Hawthorne.
Nan Hawthorne is the author of An Involuntary King: A Tale of Anglo Saxon England. She is currently working on the first of a series of historical paranormal mysteries.
Posted by Nic Mokhoff on May 8, 2009 04:16 PM in Consumer
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