Video: Blade Runner starring the iPod shuffle and Kindle 2
By Thomas Ricker 
posted Apr 24th 2009 5:25AM
posted Apr 24th 2009 5:25AM
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
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...are you testing whether i am a useless feature, or a lesbian Mr.Deckard?...
Go RAMA!!! (Person who wrote above comment)
Also, this video kicks ass. Kindle sounds better!
Did somebody say Rendevous ... Get it? Rama?
I'll be here all week.
Beautiful. This movie is a classic masterpiece. This is for Zhora!
the kindle sounds much better than the iPod shuffle, but still it's very poor. I wouldn't want to hear the Kindle voice for more than a minute.
In that sense the Shuffle is the "better" implementation - you only have to hear it for a few seconds at a time instead of like the Kindle, where you're expected to read a whole book like that.
I wonder if either device dreams of electric sheep...
Too obvious?
Yeah :\
Dammit, after seeing the video I hear all the comments in my head in those voices as I read them, it;'s a very tortoise-like experience if you know what I mean D:
yeah that was an XKCD comic the other day
The comments are even weirder than the play...
I totally second that!
I see no video...
Likewise until I went to *spit* IE (I didn't have a video under FF2 but strangely do under IE).
Oh... well, I'm not going to do that.
Safari works just fine!
FF3 works fine, on my ancient XP laptop.
i got it w/ FF3, i dunno.
you didn't miss much. the shuffle sounded like a typical text to speech, kinda broken between words. the kindle flowed pretty well and i was surprised at how good it sounded, though it might not quite be there to listen to a whole book.
turn off you adblock and you will be just fine
The Nanos' voice has better sound (quality) although the annunciation is more choppy. This could be because the kindle voice was opted to be more bit-crushed to minimize this choppiness. As far as I understand it is easier to make a voice sound more natural by reducing its quality (meaning "baseness, depth"). A medium of the two would make for better voice acting.
I think the Kindle sounded more natural - it obviously has pronunciations for common phrases built in, whereas the iPod doesn't. Of course the two are for completely different applications, the Shuffle was never meant to read out whole sentences.
Kindle sounds a lot like windows XP's (and maybe w98?) defaults, and that is a bit sad, you'd think things would improve in 10 years or whatever its been.
The Kindle 2 voice sounds like one of the Brotherhood of Steel soldiers.
I can't even get a good grade on a blood test, let alone a Voight-Kampff test.
I rather dream about unicorns.
I just spent 1 term studying this movie at school. No jokes lol. Now, that unicorn scene depicts....
I've been scanned! Darkly!
The Kindle has a, more or less, better flow in his sentences (liaison in french). It somehow seems to be more fluent, but this should be much better as the Kindle is intendet to read complete books! For the iPod shuffle the voice is okay, as it is intended to announce the tracks only. But in fact, both of them really suck! It's time to invent something revolutionnairy, so go ahead geeks :)
The TTS built into Mac OS X is better than either of these. I know from experience that the Kindle makes a lot more pronunciation mistakes than the Mac, for one thing. Some of the Mac voices enhance their realism by "inhaling" between sentences, which is kind of clever. But even the best TTS still pretty much sucks. Until you have computers that can actually *understand* the words and sentences they're reading, they're not going to do a decent job of reading aloud, IMO.
Didn't TTS start on windows? I hear they are indeed beter, but I'm told vista and later has made improvements, although I never tried vista's speech and I seldomly start up my vista partition, does vista or w7 use TTS too?
Questions questions, and not enough interest/energy ratio to look it up.
No, TTS started way back before Windows. If I had to guess, I'd say it predates the IBM PC (but I also suffer from low interest/energy quotient...).
My first encounter was Dr. Sbaitso, under DOS.
I was able to watch this on another website in FF3, but Engadget messed theirs up somehow. Looking at Noscript I see that Engadget really like that ad revenue.
Worked for me and I didn't need to make additional permissions for my noscript.
After checking I seem to have scifi.com whitelisted already, probably from some earlier trouble seeing something (BSG?) on their site.
No Video in FF!!!!
Fix it ya slags!
That's a terrible widget. Moderately funny video, good for comparing the T2S outputs. The kindle sort of impressed me.
As for "straight to nerdclassic" status...sorry, no great justice here.
Yeah agreed, the 'video with computervoices' thing has been done to death a bit with youtubes and windows speech and such and it's hard to become a classic now, especially since there were some funny efforts in the past that easily beat this.
Hi, annoying stickler guy here. Doesn't iTunes pre-record the voice-over and just send the recording over to the Shuffle? So anyone trying to make this a a comparison is is actually comparing a computer running iTunes to the Kindle doing this all on its own. Still, cool video. Toodles.
I'm not sure that is correct, if it is then it's pre-recorded on the run in itunes itself and still artificial, because it's been know to make mistakes and have issues with some songs which shows it's not done by some human interacting at apple's HQ but done by some program.
I'm not in the business.... I AM the business
Kindle has great speech. I'm incredibly impressed. That's better than any other speech program out there.
Ipod is prerecorded and it still sucks.
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Sony laptop batteries on fire in a conference room. I watched Keynote speeches glitter in the dark at the Moscone Center. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain..."
you win sir
*doves flutter*
*starts a slow clap*
boy... iPod shuffle voice sucks.
That sucked...
Leon.
We have a long ways to go...
Leon.
You know what my Old ibook g3 with Tiger has a really sexy text to speech if you choose the Brazilian girl voice. she has a cute accent and everything why the hell didant apple use her voice it totally made up for the roboticness of the voice!
im too lazy to remember what the name of the voice profile is on it ... u can figure it out if u have tiger OS . not sure if she is still on lepoard
im no apple fanboy but I like buying ebay for em dirt cheap to laugh at the people who spent 10 times what I paid used new
I am blown away by how good the Kindle sounds