Greetings. The Authors Guild, in one of the most downright, patently silly moves I've seen in the intellectual property arena in quite some time, has forced Amazon to modify the synthesized text-to-speech feature of their Kindle portable e-book unit, so that publishers/authors can control whether or not you will be permitted to have a book read to you by a barely tolerable synthetic voice. The Guild's theory is that since Amazon isn't paying for audio rights (of the sort associated with commercial audio books), synthesized voices should also be under the Guild's control.

This is pure goofiness with a capital G. Synthesized speech has indeed gotten better over the years, but in many respects is still quite reminiscent of what I was dealing with hacking the "Federal Screw Works" (that's the name, gang!) Votrax VS6 phonetic synthesizer at UCLA for my "Touch Tone Unix" project several decades ago. That is, there's no way that you'd confuse their emotionless vocalizations with real human speech the vast majority of the time, and their overall sound quality and intelligibility remain inferior in major ways.

Would most people who buy audio books happily suffer a move by publishers to switch from professional narrations to synthesized speech? Of course not. There's absolutely no comparison. And PC-based text readers have been around for many years without attracting the Guild's wrath.

Attempts to block the use of synthesized text readers by devices like the Kindle fly in the face of fair use, and would appear to be ripe for legislative and/or judicial remedies.

"Awt leeest dats mie ohpinieon."

--Lauren--