Although I’m extremely late to the party on this one, attacks on Kindle’s text-to-speech
(TTS) technology seem extremely misplaced to me. Roy Blount—a very funny
writer—led the early charge in his role as President of the Author’s Guild. The
big objection is that the ability to create an automated audiobook steals away the
audiobook money stream from authors who already feel unfairly underfunded.
Still, one wonders how well the Kindle could capture Roy’s bluster, or southern accent?
TTS capabilities are improving each year, and technologically, they're frankly amazing. For the sight-impaired, a talking Kindle opens up content in no other way available. If you want to hear The New York Times--why you’d want to is a separate question--you can. Quality audio production prohibits cranking out that kind of volume each day ... so for that sort of publication, the Kindle “steals” nothing at all. If anything, it expands delivery options, audience, and branded awareness.
While automated audio is better than nothing, it’s a sorry replacement for a real human voice. If Male Voice’s rendition makes for as enjoyable, evocative, and equivalent an audiobook as a live narrator can muster, that narrator should perhaps move to copy-editing.
Even in the non-fiction arena in which I tend to record, automation costs listeners a lot by its inability to suss out a nuance. Over a year ago I decided to test my assumptions, comparing my own reading of academic material to that of a text-to-speech engine. You can check out the results here.
Suffice it to say that there is simply no comparison when gauging by listeners’ ability to comprehend. It’s a rare narrator who can read much of anything in one take. Even reading quietly, you frequently gaze backward to mentally insert missing commas, or re-emphasize different words to enable understanding. The Kindle may sound good, but it neither thinks nor emotes. Narrators can, and do.
A March opinion piece in Publisher’s Weekly frames the debate nicely. The Kindle may be imperfect, but it’s an invaluable improvement over being denied content just because you can’t see. If authors could somehow guarantee this greater access to their beloved written words, their dislike of the Kindle would be fair. But they can’t, and they don’t.
Let’s just be grateful that people still care enough about words that they’re eager to read them--or hear them--however they can.
