NYT: New Kindle can't say 'Barack Obama'

Try Barry

Thanx, I'll stick to the paper ones.

And... who cares? Enough of your love affair with obama already and report the news.

Mispronouncing names of people and places is nothing new; mature speech synthesis packages have databases to handle names. Even simple names like "Jesse" would likely be mispronounced by basic English pronunciation rules as "Jess" instead of "Jess-ee".

That said, while "Barack" I can see, pronouncing "Obama" wrong seems really wrong to me. The word "Alabama" is the exception to normal English pronunciation, not the rule. Almost every common words in english containing the letters "ama" together are pronounced with a long "a" sound (ah), followed by the "m" followed by a schwa ("uh")–llama, drama, kama, mama, pajama, shaman, raman, etc.

It's actually pretty hard to think of *any* words in English *except* Alabama in which the first "a" in an "ama" construction is pronounced like the "a" in "ham". Sadly, every speech synthesis package out there seems to get this entirely backwards by default and only has specific lists of exceptional words to pronounce with an "ah" sound. I don't get it....

David

Horrible article. Should be retitled "random text-to-voice application mispronounces some words" so people will know that this information is old sock. Text-to-voice has been imperfect for quite some time, this is old news. Would you write another article about it if it mispronounced "swine flu"?

What is the point of an article like this?

I wish I had this writers job, so I could dig up articles from 10 years in the past, insert one or two new "topical" words and be done with my work. Kudos, cash that check from CNN.com with pride. Now see if you can link the kindle to being racist and you may have another article on your hands!

The english language has a set of rules that are supposed to be followed in order to pronounce given words. The kindle follows those rules but unfortunately, society has come to accept variet spellings that make no grammatical sense. Barack Obama is one of those which should phonetically be spelled Barac Obahma. The NYT articale even says "Kindle owners in Boston, however, may want to avoid the sports pages for now. The Kindle pronounces “Celtics” with an initial hard “c.”"... guess what, Celtics is SUPPOSED to be pronounce with a hard 'c'!

Lol, my old Mac says Barack and Obama just fine.

Don't see the problem, one little patch and they can have it reconize the name. The fact is we've came a long way from some of the early ones which couldn't pronounce some of the simplist words

How do I switch voices from male to female on the Kindle2?

Barack Obama is the best democrat president in my opinion. he makes the best judgment and foreign policies.. "

Barack Obama is the best president-`,

barack obama would be listed as one of the greatest presidents of the USA. he is really a great person "

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Obama's trip to Chicago should help pad the DCCC's coffers. In April, events the president attended for the DCCC in San Francisco helped net $3.25 million for the committee.^'^`

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