"Why is Amazon's text-to-speech system so bad?" I find that harsh. From the sample from "The Da Vinci Code", I think it's pretty good. It sounds a little bit l

"Why is Amazon's text-to-speech system so bad?" I find that harsh. From the sample from "The Da Vinci Code", I think it's pretty good. It sounds a little bit like an old radio recording but it could be mistaken for a human voice if it were not for the flat intonations. In any case, it sounds way better than the current text-to-speech on a Mac, which, even though has improved since 1984, doesn't sound that much different from the original Macintosh. (still have the synthesized sound to it) So, no it's not perfect and sounds odd especially for dialogs but I was expecting something more like on Macs and was pleasantly surprised.