President Barack Obama Problematic for Amazon Kindle

1 Comment By Eran Abramson on May 12th, 2009 in Hi Tech News

This new update about the US President Barack Obama is kind of odd, for it claims that the new Amazon Kindle cannot pronounce the name of the current President.

The new Kindle models including the Kindle DX have been praising about their text to speech technology, and while it sounds like a wonderful feature, not being able to pronounce Barack Obama seems like an extreme error (or ‘racist’ for the extremists).

According to Yahoo, when the Kindle reading device attempts to say the President’s name, it sounds a little more like: “Brack Alabama”. It is a nice try but doesn’t really deliver the news we are hoping it would.

Many could argue that the Reading device is aimed at books, so it won’t be much of a problem, but if Barack is not pronounced right…who knows what else isn’t. In addition, books will come mentioning Obama’s name and E-Readers also aim to provide a digital newspaper device, which doesn’t make it easy to ignore mentioning Barack Obama.

Amazon is aware of the mishap and already developed a patch which should fix this error. It should be available shortly and will be delivered automatically using the Wireless features of the Kindle. Until the fix is sent out, at least Oprah has something new to Tweet about.

Thank you Gila for the info!

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