AllThingsD » text to speech

A Kindle Swipes Fine, but Still Hooked on a Nook

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 23:23:22 +0000

Despite the advantages of full-featured touchscreen tablets like the iPad, plenty of people opt for e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle, finding them more comfortable in the hand and easier on the eyes.

[ See post to watch video ]

This week, I tested the new Kindle Touch in a head-to-head comparison with Barnes & Noble’s Nook Simple Touch. The Kindle Touch includes several features that Kindle fans have been waiting for, particularly better navigation. The Nook Simple Touch, which came out last summer, dropped in price to $99 and received a software update last week.

Navigating these touchscreens is a breeze, and you’ll be happy reading with either the Kindle Touch or Nook Simple Touch. Both feature E-Ink, nonreflective screens without backlights—great for long stretches of reading. These smaller devices are also lighter than a tablet.

Overall, I prefer the Nook for its better price and usability.

The Nook

Each e-reader costs $99, but the Kindle Touch comes pre-loaded with so-called special offers—ads that take over the device’s screen when it’s in sleep mode and appear whenever you touch its Menu button. A Kindle Touch without on-screen ads is $139, or $40 more than the ad-free Nook. A Kindle Touch with a 3G Internet connection costs $149; Barnes & Noble doesn’t offer a 3G Nook Simple Touch.

Physically, the Kindle Touch is a bit taller, while the Nook is slightly wider with a contoured back that’s easier to hold. The Kindle Touch relies solely on tapping or swiping on the left or right of the device’s touchscreen to turn pages. Nook users can turn pages using these methods or physical buttons on the left and right sides of the screen.

I prefer the option of physical buttons so I can hold the device and not move my hand each time I want to turn the page. These buttons are also handy at times when touching the screen isn’t ideal, like after using suntan lotion at the beach.

Though the Kindle does a lot of the same things the Nook does, Amazon’s clever terms make these same actions sound more whimsical. When using the cloud to sync content and page location across devices, Amazon calls this Whispersync. Amazon’s community-generated encyclopedia is named Shelfari.

Three notable new features work with Amazon’s Kindle Touch.

X-Ray is a feature that displays book-report-like data points when someone taps the screen at any point while reading one of “thousands” (Amazon wouldn’t give a more specific number) of titles.

The Kindle

This could be a real boon for non-fiction readers, but since I don’t read a lot of non-fiction, X-Ray wasn’t too useful in my books. While reading John Grisham’s “The Litigators,” I used X-Ray to read Wikipedia descriptions of Chicago and Big Pharma. This data can also come from Shelfari.

The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is available to Amazon Prime members—Prime costs $79 a year—and lets users borrow from over 5,000 titles. People who use this can borrow one book each month with no due date. I tried this and found books in the Kindle store listed with “borrow for free” icons where a price would normally display. I tapped this option beside “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins, and the book was sent to my Kindle. An on-screen message notified me that I couldn’t borrow again until Dec. 1.

Finally, Kindle users can borrow books from their public library via easy, wireless downloads, though these are bound by the same lending rules as physical library books. I borrowed a book from my Washington, D.C., public library by browsing available Kindle books on the library’s website and virtually checking out a book after entering my library card number. I followed a link from there to Amazon.com, where I selected the “Get Library Book” box, which appeared where “Add to Cart” is normally found. Your Kindle must be using a Wi-Fi connection—not 3G—to get these books.

The Nook can only load library books via a clumsy USB cord transferring process. A Barnes & Noble spokeswoman said the company plans to offer Wi-Fi downloading of library books early next year.

If you’d rather lend books to fellow e-reader users, Kindle and Nook can do this. Books can be lent to friends for 14 days, during which time the book’s owner can’t read them.

The latest Nook software update makes improvements like the ability to turn pages faster. Both devices enable highlighting passages, though the Nook doesn’t allow public highlighting like the Kindle, which shares highlights with other readers. Both can send book details to friends via Facebook and Twitter. Kindle offers a text-to-speech function for books, which Nook lacks.

The Kindle Touch is a huge improvement on Amazon’s last Kindle, but Barnes & Noble’s Nook Simple Touch maintains its lead in this category.

Write to Katie at katie.boehret@wsj.com.

Google Translate Can Now Say "Take That, Siri" in 14 Languages

Ina Fried — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:00:53 +0000

Google’s translation app for Android can now converse in far more languages.

The company, which has long offered text translations and speech-to-text translation, in January added an experimental feature allowing speech-to-speech translation between English and Spanish.

With Thursday’s update, the app now can translate among 14 spoken languages. Along with English and Spanish, the app now translates between Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish.

“Mobile technology and the web have made it easier for people around the world to access information and communicate with each other,” product manager Jeff Chin said in a blog posting. “But there’s still a daunting obstacle: the language barrier. We’re trying to knock down that barrier so everyone can communicate and connect more easily.”

Chin noted that the technology remains an early alpha version, with accents and background noise still a factor in accuracy.

“But since it depends on examples to learn, the quality will improve as people use it more,” Chin said. “We wanted to get this early version out to help start the conversation no matter where you are in the world.”

Google has also added in a feature that lets you hear what it thinks you said before it translates. That can be especially useful if what one wants to ask is “How much for the knife?” and Google hears “How much for your wife?”

The update comes in handy as AllThingsD heads to AsiaD, with the mobile team (a.k.a. me) headed to Taiwan and Korea in addition to Hong Kong. We’ll try to do a hands-on test in at least one of the supported languages on the trip.

Meanwhile, the number of languages supported for text and text-to-speech translations continues to grow, with 63 languages supported for text, speech-to-text in 17 languages and text-to-speech working in 24 languages.

Wi-Fi Hotspot Safety and Mac Viruses

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 22:50:38 +0000

I have had a little disagreement with my IT guy. He says that when taking my laptop out in public, I should never type anything with passwords or confidential information. He says that someone can pick up my information. I say that I can’t believe that everyone in public is totally exposed. There must be some way to protect yourself while on a public network. Who is right?

There’s no single correct answer. It’s true that thieves in public places can and do steal passwords and other sensitive information transferred over public Wi-Fi hotspots. But it’s also true that methods like Virtual Private Networks can mitigate this problem, and that most public hotspots are, just by the odds, unlikely to harbor these thieves at any one time. However, my advice is to avoid doing any sensitive tasks, like banking or stock trading, while using public hotspots. And, if you’re doing anything confidential on your company or home network remotely, use a VPN, which is like a secure tunnel through the internet.

I recently purchased a new iMac and am considering installing anti-virus/spyware/malware programs on it. Reader forums in MacWorld magazine say it’s not needed. A local newspaper computer columnist says he’s had Macs since the early ’80s and has never run an AV program and has had no problems. Other online computer advisers say Macs are always vulnerable and advise to run AV programs. Any recommendations here?

No computer is inherently invulnerable to malicious software, and that includes the Macintosh. However, nearly every malicious program known is meant to run on Windows and simply won’t operate on the Mac operating system. The handful of Mac viruses and other malware that have been discovered are either proofs of concept, or have spread to very few users and done little or no damage. Most Mac users I’ve known don’t run third-party security software and haven’t had malware problems. So I don’t routinely recommend Mac security software.

There are two caveats, however. If you are running Windows on your Mac, you should install Windows security software, to run while Windows is in use. Also, Mac users are just as vulnerable as Windows users are to online scams, or to insecure public networks. So, even though you may never get a virus, you still have to be careful about doing sensitive Internet tasks via public hotspots or careless behavior like clicking on links sent you by unknown email senders.

My car has an audio jack that integrates any input into the sound system. I know that Kindle has a text-to-speech feature. Would I be able to use that feature via the audio jack in the car?

Without having tested your car’s input jack, I assume the answer is yes. The Kindle has a standard headphone jack.

However, note that the text-to-speech feature works only on certain books, not all of them. Publishers have the right to allow or disallow it for any book.

Also, even if it’s enabled, it isn’t the same as an audio book, which is usually read by a trained narrator or by the author. Instead, it’s a computer doing the reading.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox and my other columns at the All Things Digital website, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Intel Makes Leap in Device to Aid Impaired Readers

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:03:59 +0000

Despite all of the advances in digital technology, too few high-tech products have emerged to help the blind read books or other paper documents, or to make reading such texts easier for people with impaired vision or language-related learning disabilities.

A few years back, a breakthrough was made with text-to-speech software that could be installed on a specific mobile phone, but with limitations due to the phone’s small screen and buttons, and restricted processor power.

[ See post to watch video ]

Now, Intel (INTC), the giant chip maker, is attacking this problem with a new product: the Intel Reader. It’s a chunky, book-size device with a computer-grade processor and a large, forward-facing screen that can be viewed easily while its downward-facing camera is shooting text for translation into audio and giant text. It also has raised buttons that are easy to find via touch.

I’ve been testing the Intel Reader with books, newspapers, magazines, bank statements, menus and even cereal boxes. My results were decidedly mixed. In some cases, especially with books and certain magazine articles, it worked pretty well, often almost perfectly. In others, it did a poor job. I also found that it takes a lot of practice to learn how to aim the Reader’s camera properly.

However, an important caveat is in order. I have full, normal vision and no learning disabilities, so I can’t put myself in the place of someone who is unable to read paper documents, or who struggles to do so. For them, the limitations I found in this product might easily pale when compared with its liberating benefits. More information is at reader.intel.com.

When it worked as promised, the Intel Reader was a delight. It would start reading the text to me in under a minute, while displaying the words on the 4.3-inch screen in an easily adjusted font size that could allow as little as one word to fill the display. I also could switch to a view of the photo of the whole page, and zoom in to focus on a portion of the text. It holds multiple texts and has an easy interface with large menus that the machine can read to you.

But the Reader is relatively big and expensive. It costs a whopping $1,500 and is available from only a limited number of retailers who specialize in products for special-needs consumers. By contrast, the competing cellphone product, called the KNFB mobile reader, is much smaller because it uses a standard Nokia (NOK) mobile phone. It can be purchased through Amazon.com (AMZN), also for $1,500.

The Intel Reader

The Intel Reader is a special-purpose computer that weighs 1.4 pounds and is dominated by the roomy horizontal screen, with control buttons to the right and below. Along the bottom edge is a five-megapixel camera with flash.

The Reader’s second-most-prominent feature is a large, bright-blue “shoot” button, which occupies all of the diagonally cut upper right hand corner. You press this easy-to-find button twice to take a picture of the text that the Reader will then convert.

Both the text on the screen and the speed of the audio reading can be adjusted with prominent, raised buttons. Other buttons begin and end playback, and navigate through the menus.

The Reader uses the same Intel Atom processor found on netbook computers, and can hold 600 processed pages that you can transfer to and from a PC or Mac. It also can convert your processed pages into audio files for playback on a portable audio player.

The Reader can capture two book pages at a time. Intel also sells a $400 stand to make book conversion faster and easier.

In my tests, my biggest problem was aiming correctly. The Reader automatically corrects the curvature and orientation of pages. But in many of the items I captured, the first and last few words were either garbled or skipped. The company admits there is a learning curve to the Reader, and I did get better with time.

The Reader did a great job with pages from the new Ken Auletta book, “Googled,” and a fair job with pages from the first Harry Potter book. To my surprise, it didn’t stumble so much with the made-up words in the latter book, but with common ones like “magic.” In the book about Google (GOOG), the reader’s robotic voice kept pronouncing MySpace as “mizzpizz.” And it often pronounced the word “I” as “one.”

The device was excellent at reading a menu from a local bakery, even down to the tiny type, but it utterly failed to make sense of a simple summary statement from my bank, or the front of a box of Cheerios.

Newspapers were a particular challenge. The Reader frequently picked up fragments of adjoining articles or picture captions, or got completely flummoxed. In one case, it got permanently stuck trying to process an article. Intel says that was a rare bug it will fix.

On balance, I’d recommend the Reader, provider the user understands its limitations and is willing to tackle the learning curve.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at
mossberg@wsj.com.

Shut Up, Kindle

John Paczkowski — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:55:04 +0000

Rather than argue with the Authors Guild over the text-to-speech feature of its new Kindle 2 e-book reader, Amazon is modifying the device’s software to make it optional. Authors and publishers will now be able to decide if they want the function enabled or not on titles for which they own the rights. Amazon (AMZN) announced the move in a statement released late Friday afternoon, in which it also said it believes the Kindle’s text-to-speech function to be legal:

Kindle 2′s experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given. Furthermore, we ourselves are a major participant in the professionally narrated audiobooks business through our subsidiaries Audible and Brilliance. We believe text-to-speech will introduce new customers to the convenience of listening to books and thereby grow the professionally narrated audiobooks business. Nevertheless, we strongly believe many rightsholders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver’s seat.

Therefore, we are modifying our systems so that rightsholders can decide on a title by title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title. We have already begun to work on the technical changes required to give authors and publishers that choice. With this new level of control, publishers and authors will be able to decide for themselves whether it is in their commercial interests to leave text-to-speech enabled. We believe many will decide that it is.

The move comes on the heels of a meandering New York Times editorial in which Roy Blount Jr., president of the Authors Guild, argued that the Kindle’s roboticized nondramatic book readings are a threat to the audio book market.

iBored: Apple's Shareholder Meeting

John Paczkowski — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 22:49:47 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

iBored: Apple's Shareholder Meeting

John Paczkowski — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 22:49:47 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Authors Guild President: What, Then, of the Playing and Talking Machines?

John Paczkowski — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 20:00:16 +0000

The idea of derivative rights and royalties for text-to-speech “audio books” like those provided by Amazon’s Kindle 2 might seem ludicrous now, but will it seem ludicrous in a few years when the device’s now grating text-to-speech voice has been inevitably humanized? A reasonable question, and one that Roy Blount Jr., president of the Authors Guild, poses in an Op Ed in the New York Times today. An excerpt, rejiggered a bit to better make the point that Blount buried in a rather circuitous editorial.

Kindle 2 can read books aloud. And Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights. True, you can already get software that will read aloud whatever is on your computer. But Kindle 2 is being sold specifically as a new, improved, multimedia version of books–every title is an e-book and an audio book rolled into one. And whereas e-books have yet to win mainstream enthusiasm, audio books are a billion-dollar market, and growing. Audio rights are not generally packaged with e-book rights. They are more valuable than e-book rights. Income from audio books helps not inconsiderably to keep authors, and publishers, afloat….You may be thinking that no automated read-aloud function can compete with the dulcet resonance of Jim Dale reading ‘Harry Potter’ or of authors, ahem, reading themselves. But the voices of Kindle 2 are quite listenable….And that sort of technology is improving all the time….no part of my voice is competing with my own audio books yet. But people who want to keep on doing creative things for a living must be duly vigilant about any new means of transmitting their work.”

Ah.

The crux of Blount’s argument, then, is not so much that the roboticized nondramatic book readings of the Kindle threaten the audio book market today, but that they will in the future when they better approximate the human voice. We must be vigilant about any news means of transmitting our work. And given that, wouldn’t it be prudent to rethink the way authors license and profit from their work? That seems a reasonable point and one worth discussing. After all, we’ve seen this situation time and time again, all the way back to John Philip Sousa and player piano music rolls. In fact, if you think about it, the Kindle’s text-to-speech function is a sort of player piano for books. And if you take that view, these words from Sousa, penned back in 1906, still resonate today:

For the life of me I am puzzled to know why the powerful corporations controlling these playing and talking machines are so totally blind to the moral and ethical questions involved. Could anything be more blamable, as a matter of principle, than to take an artist’s composition, reproduce it a thousandfold on their machines, and deny him all participation in the large financial returns, by hiding back of the diaphanous pretense that in the guise of a disk or roll, his composition is not his property?

Do they not realize that if the accredited composers, who have come into vogue by reason of merit and labor, are refused a just reward for their efforts, a condition is almost sure to arise where all incentive to further creative work is lacking, and compositions will no longer flow from their pens; or where they will be compelled to refrain from publishing their compositions at all, and control them in manuscript? What, then, of the playing and talking machines?”

What then of the Kindle?

Authors Guild to Kindle: Shut Up When You're Talking to Me

John Paczkowski — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:58:28 +0000

The Authors Guild, a trade group that once maligned Amazon (AMZN) for its “notorious used-book service,” is at it again–this time taking issue with the text-to-speech feature of the retailer’s new Kindle 2 e-book reader. Seems it feels the device oversteps its bounds by creating rudimentary audiobooks for which it doesn’t own the rights.

“[The Kindle's text-to-speech function] presents a significant challenge to the publishing industry,” the group said in a statement released Thursday. “Audiobooks surpassed $1 billion in sales in 2007; e-book sales are just a small fraction of that. While the audio quality of the Kindle 2, judging from Amazon’s promotional materials, is best described as serviceable, it’s far better than the text-to-speech audio of just a few years ago. We expect this software to improve rapidly….we recommend that if you haven’t yet granted your e-book rights to backlist or other titles, this isn’t the time to start. If you have a new book contract and are negotiating your e-book rights, make sure Amazon’s use of those rights is part of the dialog. Publishers certainly could contractually prohibit Amazon from adding audio functionality to its e-books without authorization, and Amazon could comply by adding a software tag that would prohibit its machine from creating an audio version of a book unless Amazon has acquired the appropriate rights. Until this issue is worked out, Amazon may be undermining your audio market as it exploits your e-books.”

Hard to view the sort of roboticized nondramatic “reading” that the Kindle provides as a “significant challenge to the publishing industry.” If that was truly the case, you’d think the industry would have gone after Apple (AAPL) for VoiceOver (could it’s “Hysterical” and “Zarvox” voice options be any more realistic?) Beyond that, the idea of derivative rights and royalties for text-to-speech just seems ludicrous.

“When you buy a book, you’re also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc.,” says author Neil Gaiman “This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one’s going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors’ societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what’s good about them with it.”

Authors Guild to Kindle: Shut Up When You're Talking to Me

John Paczkowski — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:58:28 +0000