That’s the title of my Slaw post for today.   It reads as follows:

That was the title of a presentation I attended this morning at the London TechAlliance breakfast club series.

David Ciccarelli of Voices.com was the presenter. He is well qualified to present, as he has built his business using these methods. Voices.com is interesting in itself. It is essentially a job mart for voice actors that puts together voice actors with those needing their services. As you will see from their web site, they have an impressive client list.

The Kindle text to speech feature has created a controversy on both the legal issue of copyright, and the business/consumer issue of the merits of computerized text to speech vs. audio books using voice actors.

Those on the voice actor side say that a computer generated voice just can’t match a human voice for subtlety, tone and context.  (At least not yet.)

On the copyright front, Amazon has decided that – despite its position that there is no copyright violation in text to speech – it won’t offer the feature for books if the author doesn’t want it.

In a CNN article, David Ciccarelli of Voices.com - a London, Ont. service that matches voice actors with those seeking to hire them – points out that Amazon is hedging its bets, as it also owns  Audible, a  service that sells professionally narrated audiobooks.