I got the Amazon Kindle today, just in time for an xmas present!
The online functions don't work here in the UK, sadly. I do hope they bring them around soon.
It really is surprisingly small and light. Very handy, you can read in bed all night long and not get tired in the arm.
Room for improvement:
1: The "white" of the screen is closer to middle grey.
2: The screen should be a leeeeettle bigger, methinks.
3: The change-page buttons are really too big. It's hard to just hold it without changing pages.
But it's really cool, and I'm sure it's the future.
... It can read text and it can play music. Wouldn't it be fantastic if it could read your text out loud to you!?
My Mac can already do that in an intelligible fashion, with the new voice in Mac OS X Leopard. I doubt the gap in processor power needed is all that great.
I wonder if they have thought about this?
Update:
Alex said:
I don't want a text to speech tool in my e-book reader.
We've had T2S for ages, remember "Princess" and "Bubbles" in the original power Mac voices.
Can text to speech now cope with foreign phrases, and foreign quotes in text? What about slang?
What I really want is a "dramatic text to speech" tool, preferably with a "director" utility which allows for the tool to read ahead, and switch intonation, and voice quality based on character and mood.
We've come a long way from TI's Speak And Spell, but we still have a way to go yet.
Eolake said...
Just that. The original Mac voices were barely usable for anything, they were mostly novelties. But the new voice, "Alex", in Leopard, is very usable. Of course it's not quite a human reader yet, but I can easily understand 99.9% of what it is saying, and that opens up so many vistas. It means an ebook-reader could read to me while I'm resting my eyes, or cooking, or taking a walk, or...
The same as I'm doing with audio books on my iPod, only the thing is that only a very tiny portion of the text in the world will ever be recorded by humans, it's a lot of work.
What I can do is have my Mac read the text, but then I have to sit next to it. I could record it, but that's clumsy.
Oh this post of Eo's comes just right so that I can vent a bit of my frustration:
ReplyDeleteI can transfer data from my finepix camera to the computer perfectly, but not from my Lumix to the computer. There seems to be a driver problem.
I hope I can overcome this stupid problem soon.
End of ventilation.
Have a Happy Christmas, and may 2008 be good to your back. ;-))
PS/ I love my digital camera equipment!
Another time, dear customer. Hopefully.
ReplyDelete[Insert friendly emoticon code] :-)
My Christmas wishes to the world, present company included. :-)
ReplyDeleteI don't want a text to speech tool in my e-book reader.
ReplyDeleteWe've had T2S for ages, remember "Princess" and "Bubbles" in the original power Mac voices.
Can text to speech now cope with foreign phrases, and foreign quotes in text? What about slang?
What I really want is a "dramatic text to speech" tool, preferably with a "director" utility which allows for the tool to read ahead, and switch intonation, and voice quality based on character and mood.
We've come a long way from TI's Speak And Spell, but we still have a way to go yet.
"We've had T2S for ages, remember "Princess" and "Bubbles" in the original power Mac voices."
ReplyDeleteJust that. They are barely usable for anything. But the new voice, "Alex", in Leopard, is very usable. Of course it's far from a human reader yet, but I can understand 99.9% of what it is saying, and that opens up so many vistas. It means an ebook-reader could read to me while I'm resting my eyes, or cooking, or taking a walk, or...
The same as with audio books, only the thing is that only a very tiny portion of the text in the world will ever be recorded for real.
I think when we were discussing computer animation we also discussed the possibility of virtual actors, both body and voice, provided by different sources, and combined by a "casting director".
ReplyDeleteThe trouble with spoken languages is that there are no hard rules. There are recognized forms, but no hard rules, and the rules change daily.
I don't mind a bland reading of a how to, but a bland reading of say "The Hobbit" would make the uneventful first chapter intolerable.
I guess I need to try a Mac again at some point. All the good PC voices you have to buy somewhere.
So which voices work best, the "male" or "female"? I find the male voice on my cell phones GPS system works best in the car. Other times I'm not so sure.
The new voice is only male. All the other voices are the old clunky ones. I don't know why, I would not have thought the quality of reading would be inherent in the voice itself.
ReplyDelete