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Reports from the New York Times have indicated that the Amazon Kindle’s new voice reader program is suffering from pronunciation issues and have fouled up some words, almost making them incomprehensible.  The most obvious pronunciation error is the president’s name Barack Obama, which ends up sounding like “Barrak Alabama.”  Many of the pronunciation problems that the Kindle has are from proper names that don’t appear in the dictionary. 

This is significant due to the frequency that the president’s name comes up in Kindle publications, including the electronic version of the New York Times.  Following the report, Nuance Communications that manages the Kindle text to speech feature, announced that it has fixed the error and had plans to update the dictionary that they use.

The hopeful future of electronic readers is that the voices will start to sound more natural and less robotic.  However, as of right now the Kindle reader will have to sound out things phonetically, especially when it comes across a word that it is not familiar with. 

Read: [New York Times]