[Wikipedia-l] Re: Conference report from South Africa

Tue Apr 26 15:01:54 UTC 2005

Mark Williamson wrote:
> Timwi, if you doubt the accent problem is a real one, you clearly have
> not heard many different accents in your life.

Firstly, you are not exactly helping your credibility by asserting to 
know more about my own experiences than I do.

Secondly, what is stopping speakers of various accents from speaking 
various articles? Just because an article has already been spoken by a 
Brit, doesn't exactly make it impossible for a Singaporean to contribute 
*their* version too, if they think the Brit is oh so incomprehensible.

Lastly, you are *definitely* not helping your credibility by asserting 
that an automated text-to-speech system would universally be better 
received than natural recordings! I can easily understand a wide range 
of English accents when they are spoken slowly, but I am afraid that 
text-to-speech systems are just painful to listen to.

I therefore highly recommend to fall back to automated text-to-speech 
only when a natural recording is not available.