Ben Foss, Director of Access Technology at Intel's Digital Health group said the device is also intended to assist those with severe Dyslexia, an impairment he himself grew up with. "We want people to experience the independence of being able to read on their own in a public place or anywhere they want to."

Prototypes of the paper-back sized device were tested with more than 400 visually-impaired users, including some who were completely blind. The reader can adjust the speed of reading, and it's 2GB of storage can hold about 500,000 pages of text; roughly 600 pages of scanned books.

At $1500, it's not cheap. But compared to even more expensive Braille readers, it has a shot as a specialty device. [Intel via VentureBeat]

The Kindle's voice feature works like any other, so pronunciation foibles are expected, and even predictable. Says the developer Nuance, the technology licensed by Amazon:

It's not even considered a bug. If it encounters a word it has never seen, it approaches it almost like a kid, phonetically.

But for the speech feature to be useful in a newspaper context, as Amazon wishes it to be, its library will have to be constantly updated—over the air, presumably—with pronunciation overrides for whatever weird names or places are in the news at a given time.

Of course, this would be extremely unwieldy and only marginally effective, so Amazon probably won't do it. Good luck with today's leading NYT story, Kindle owners. You might even have to read it. [NYT]

As you'd expect, not all that well. However, we'd give the Kindle 2 an enthusiastic one-clap for its moments of natural-sounding cadence. The Shuffle, on the other hand, was streamlined-mediocre. [DVICE]

Basically the story is this: the Author's Guild raised issue with the Kindle 2's new robotic text-to-speech feature, which can read any Kindle book aloud in a synthesized voice—naturally, a feature that would be an absolute delight for the vision impaired. The Author's Guild, however, saw things differently, stating that eBooks are not sold with "performance" rights and that the Kindle's read-aloud feature would cut into the sales of audio books. And last month, Amazon caved to the Guild, giving individual publishers the ability to disable the text-to-speech reader for specific books.

As you might imagine, the blind community is quite upset at this clear case of business interests getting in the way of the blind or vision impaired to have a gigantic library of Kindle books at their fingertips. I can't really see any part of the Author's Guild's argument that's not pretty evil and ridiculous, and as our own resident book author Jason Chen says: "As a guy who's written a book—however shitty it may be—if the Kindle's TTS helps just one blind person, then it's worth it."

Everything was of course peaceful and contained right in front of the Author's Guild's seventh floor offices on 32nd street on Manhattan's east side. They had a pretty fantastic march ring set up, with many folks leading those who could not see at all in the ring, and sighted people whose job was to tell the marchers when to turn. Several seeing eye dogs joined in expressing their distaste.

The Author's guild maintains that making works available to the blind is one of their highest priorities, but they've handled the situation poorly thus far—to wit, their first proposal for solving the problem was having blind Kindle owners register their devices so they could purchase audio rights to their e-books. You don't ever ask the disabled to join a special registry, especially for something like this. They said in their statement:

"The Authors Guild will gladly be a forceful advocate for amending contracts to provide access to voice-output technology to everyone. We will not, however, surrender our members' economic rights to Amazon or anyone else. The leap to digital has been brutal for print media generally, and the economics of the transition from print to e-books do not look as promising as many assume. Authors can't afford to start this transition to digital by abandoning rights."

Clearly, tensions are still high. The statement continues:

"Today's protest is unfortunate and unnecessary. We stand by our offer, first made to the Federation's lawyer a month ago and repeated several times since, to negotiate in good faith to reach a solution for making in-print e-books accessible to everyone. We extend that same offer to any group representing the disabled."

We're all about getting people paid for their work, but to cite lost royalties and audio book revenues as the main reason to deprive the blind community from the full Kindle archive —which, if you remember, Jeff Bezos hopes will soon include every book ever published—seems kind of ridiculous.

If you would like to support the National Federation of the Blind, you can do so at their website, and more can be read on the Author's Guild's position on their site. Readingrights.org also has an informed discussion of the issue.

Amazon has backed down for the Guild's comfort rather than for any legal motivation, since it's pretty clear that a robotic reading isn't the same as an audio book. "We strongly believe many rights holders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver's seat," Amazon said.

But instead of removing the feature, Amazon has simply made it optional, so publishers can decide for themselves what's best for their property. That means it's unlikely the much-advertised (though not necessarily much-loved) feature is going to be too useful for Kindle 2 owners. We're not thrilled, since the Guild has no real legal leg to stand on and seems to need Amazon more than Amazon needs them, but then again, we're not fancy-pants authors. [CNET]

I'm a fancy-pants author and I say this is crap! -JC

The Catch: It only works with books made specifically for the device, which are put together by Aigo themselves. Last time we checked, Aigo wasn't big in the publishing industry, so good try guys. Perhaps we shouldn't knock it. We are sure it will work great with tourist paraphernalia and the like, (they had an Olympics guide on show, which kind of makes sense). No word on pricing or shipping dates at present. [Aigo]

Besides being a source of comic relief, calling out the street names with this text-to-speech capability can actually be useful—keeping your eyes on the road and away from that map on the Nuvi 260's smallish 3.5-inch screen. Garmin says this Nuvi 260 will be shipping this month, and it'll retail for just under $500. And that's a "budget" unit? Expect (hope for) discounts forthwith. [Press Release]

The service will cost as much as a standard SMS and will probably be used once by every Sprint subscriber and quickly forgotten.

Sprint Unveils Text Messaging to Landline Service [LocalTechWire via Textually]

Epson Chip Can Read Text [I4U]