Hay-ree-et Bee-char Sto-wee

The Kindle 2 and the Kindle DX pronounces “Barack Obama” as “Bay-rack Oh-bamma,” slightly embarrassing for a device designed to display and read newspapers. An NYT story find this to be slightly funny but, as we all know, text-to-speech has been a fail party for years, no matter what the Authors Guild says.

The technology is very advanced; everyone has the memory of the Stephen Hawking voice, which was very robotic,” said Patrick Dexter, the director of business development at Cepstral, a Pittsburgh company that does such work and has licensed its technology to Google. “The goal right now is to get a voice that sounds almost indistinguishable from a real person.”

The system, provided by Nuance, will update its dictionary to reflect the Presidential Pronunciation.