Today, The New York Times reported that Amazon’s Kindle 2 much vaunted text-to-speech (TTS) capabilities, provided by Nuance Communications, came up short when trying to pronounce President Barack Obama’s name. The device uttered something closer to Baah-raah-k O-baah-maah (closer to the sounds in “black” and “Alabama,” the Times said. The paper adds that the problem has since been corrected. Obama’s name has added to the Kindle’s TTS dictionary and will be included in the next wireless update.

The Kindle TTS misfire came to prominence as many news organizations began openly speculating on whether subsequent versions of the Kindle could create a viable non-paper-based means of distribution. Wired, for instance was running the headline “How the Next Kindle Could Save the Newspaper Business” in stories about partnerships the The New York Times and Washington Post were looking to hatch, while mediabistro.com pondered, “Can The Kindle Save Newspapers?” Whether any of that’s true, the failure of Kindle’s TTS to pronounce things like the President’s name correctly may put at least a temporary crimp in any role speech might in any Kindle paper-saving venture.

When it comes to that though, don’t blame Nuance. (more…)

For many long years, the speech industry has poured great masses of research and the blood of thousands into speech analytics, trying, with as much muster as humankind can afford, to bring us improved automatic recognition and audio mining capabilities. After the toils of countless men and women, we’ve come so far that many solutions boast near 100 percent recognition rates, while others can tell us a speaker’s gender, emotional state, and can verify his identity. But a long overlooked branch of speech analytics claims to go one step further, being able to reveal the deepest and recesses of the human unconscious.

That branch?

REVERSE SPEECH ANALYTICS.

Reverse speech analysis is derived from the premise that the unconscious is a “mirror world”-a claim loosely drawn from the works of psychoanalysts like Freud, Jung, Lacan, cultural works like Through the Looking Glass by Louis Carroll, and the scientifically recognized works of Nostradamus-who I hear from reverse speech analysts used to conjure his predictions from the reflection in a glass of water on his night table. Speech, the theory goes, can be inverted to reveal unconscious thought just the same as other unconscious trappings.

Resting their weight on this solid foundation, reverse analysts claim that by reversing a recording of an utterance they can access unconscious material buried in our words. Basically, this means that they just play something backwards and look for stuff that kind of sounds like other stuff.

Of course, the minute the technique was discovered it was immediately applied to leading world figures. Using this method, one leading analyst, Jon Kelly, has been able to predict:

• President Bush’s intent to invade Iraq;
• Who the BTK killer was a whole fifteen minutes before his confession; and, most importantly,
• What Oprah really thought of author James Frey two weeks before she publicly denounced him a liar and grade-A, #1 jerkface.

If you’re not convinced, Kelly tells an interviewer in 2006 that the repeated results of his process defy chance, that they’re borne out to be statistically significant. You have to admit, three for three…that’s a pretty decent sample size. There are scientific taste tests in commercials with smaller sample sizes.

Most startling however, Kelly  recently discovered that President Obama may know about a significant extraterrestrial event when he discovered the reverse phrase “knows power of alien saucer” when the president uttered the words, “To responsibly leave Iraq to its people.”

You can take a listen to the clip forwards and backwards here.

Now, I’m no reverse speech analyst, but to my ears the backwards clip sounds like “knows power of alien schnauzers,” a potentially more startling discovery than any saucer. Subjecing the clip to further investigation, we also find that Obama, if referring to himself, unconsciously thinks about himself in the third person. Is our President having some kind of identity crisis? I sure hope not! Then again, considering that most of these speeches are drafted by speech writers, maybe it’s just Obama’s speech writer who’s having dissociative identity problems and know about space dogs.

The Obama speech isn’t the first time Kelly has mined an inaugural address for secret unconscious coding. The Iraq War prediction, for instance, was made way back in 2001 when Kelly discovered that a small chunk of the phrase, “And to all nations we will speak for the values that gave our Nation birth,” sounded kind of like “Mission of Baghdad,” backwards.

Cheez! It’s enough to make one has to wonder how he cracked the Oprah nut!

If you’re thinking that Kelly’s reverse speech analytics skills are just for American cultural and political heavyweights and not for your petty personal problems, think again! You can contract Kelly through his firm, Speech Analysis by Phone (S.A.P.), and have him or one of his trained associates analyze your loved ones and hated enemies over the phone. He guarantees verifiable results, and “exclusive secrets revealed.”

Damn shazaam! It’s a wonder S.A.P. hasn’t been bought up by Nuance, automated, and integrated into their analytics suite.

I’ve already subjected my brother, Adam B., to a couple of rounds of reverse speech analysis. The sentence “Boy, it’s really speeching cats and dogs today,” when played backwards reveals the following hidden message: “Stuffed crust pizza for dinner.”

Try it at home and share you results!

Delve Networks has just released a little app that uses their video search tech to navigate Barack Obama’s inauguration speech.

The engine is pretty keen. It pulls up all sorts of key terms like America, blood, dirt, and freedom—in short, everything we love in the U.S.A, my brother Adam B. notes.

Still, the engine has some limitations. It can’t pull up any word in the speech, just some key words that are, to the best of our knowledge, defined by Delve itself. You can’t, for instance, pull up every iteration of the word “and.” Aw shucks, right?

There is also at least one very glaring omission from the keywords, too. A commentator from Blog Le Monde complains that while you can search for terms like “Muslims” and “nation,” when he searched for “nonbelievers,” a word spoken for the first time on Tuesday in an inaugural speech, the machine was [notably] silent.” I feel like there’s some played out joke about French atheism in here, but Le Monde’s man has a point.

When I tried to replicate his results, I was unable to find the word “nonbeliever,” “non-believer,” the term “non believer,” or even just “believer.” I eventually found the passage in question by searching “non” by itself. The French paper’s blog seems to suggest there’s some foul play at hand, but at the very least it is a curious oversight.

See if you can find any other glaring lapses and let us know, Speech Heads.