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Amazon bought a thing that does a thing Amazon also does, so presumably the first thing will help out with Amazon’s thing, we think. Ordinarily, this isn’t the kind of story we’d post to Gizmodo, but in light of the fact that there’s basically literally nothing happening in tech today, here you go. Let’s talk about it.
The thing that Amazon bought is called IVONA Software. IVONA Software is ten years old which means it’s half way to its 20s and that’s the decade when you find out who you really are. IVONA Software does lots of text-to-speech stuff, which is good because Amazon has books and those books have lots of text Amazon would like to turn into speech. (IVONA’s actually already used in a bunch of those features, but whatever.) And for those of you think that text-to-speech is just for lazy people who don’t read good, it’s not (but it is a little)! It’s also so Amazon can get money from blind people too and also help them “read books”.
In conclusion, please god let something else happen today. [Amazon]
Google Translate for Android Now Supports Speech-to-Speech Translation in 14 Languages
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How Do Computers Understand Speech?
Amazon’s website tried to get me to take out an Audible subscription so I could listen to the book I just bought.
It was a graphic novel…
Brilliant! I assume you snapped up the offer?
No reason not to, all those silly words to read get in the way of the pretty drawings anyway. Now I can bask in the splendour of the illustration while having the words pumped directly into my lugholes.
How the hell can you find this news to be boring?
I’ve been playing with Ivona website all day today. I’ve even downloaded the trial, and I’m thinking of buying the product. Their Welsh is impeccable, as far as I can tell.
And of course it helps that the guys are Polish. Go us!
Eh? welsh-polish?!
You’re right …their welsh is impeccable. I know this because what they said has no similarity whatsoever to what was written
This is the first time I’ve ever seen a news site admitting it was having a slow news day. I appreciate the honesty. I’d like to see other sites do it more often.
Every other major tech blog covered this, so why would you not do it?
Paging Kat Hannaford. You might need to have another word with your out of hours people. This article is (IMO) offensive.
This is a ‘slow news’ post? It’s the best, most grown up thing, you posted today!
This is vertical integration at its best. Also, elastic speech recognition and elastic audiobook creation for the FTW! That made me quite excited. Make it happen, Amazon.
With Amazon financial and logistic backing, this will put voice artists out of business by the end of the decade.
I’ve found Ivona to be absolutely outstanding whilst I was trying it,. I don’t know how you can say this isn’t newsworthy.
Those 10 years have made it unbelievably natural sounding and accurate. Much better than some of the more publicised and supposedly newsworthy sassy upstarts.
Get it together man, this is borderline offensive.