[extropy-chat] How close are we to an iPod that can read ebooks to us?

[Brett Paatsch]

I've been thinking about the success of iPods, the increasing availability of ebooks, often for free where the books are out of copyright, and the relative difficulty of reading in bed or comfortably and conveniently because laptops are still too cumbersome. 

I got to wondering what the technical barriers would be now to producing something like an iPod that could download ebooks and either, or preferrably both, read the text of those books to people who are either too lazy to change pages or perhaps because they want to have their hands free to drive or something else.

This list has quite a few folk that are interested in computer technology, so my question is, how close are we to getting a general text to voice reading technology of a quality such that I as a reader could choose to a preferred voice (maybe Carl Sagan or someone doesn't matter who really) to read the text (an ebook) of my choosing to me?

I haven't really kept track of developments in voice recognition for several years, and it could be that converting text from ebooks, is an easier exercise than converting joe and jane home pc users mutterings into something that can feed into a wordprocessor.

Any thoughts?

Brett Paatsch
 
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