DVICE has an excellent video showing the difference between text-to-speech and what us humans call “neurons-to-speech.” As evidenced by this brief scene from Blade Runner, acted out by an iPod Shuffle and a Kindle 2, we find that the Authors Guild is as crazy as a sack of beetles in a windstorm.
TTS hasn’t improved for one good reason: the human voice is just fine for reading out text and through the use of simple synthesis – Garmin, for example, uses a nice Australian woman to synthesize everything its GPS devices have to say – you can say almost anything you want. Although you’ll get a few clinkers in there where the software can’t quite translate a phoneme, it’s mostly correct.
