Amazon's Kindle 2 voice technology impresses

Amazon's new Kindle 2. (AP photo)

For those tech savvy individuals who enjoy reading books and are somewhat up on their recent technological advancements, the Kindle 2 probably rings bells that are all too familiar. The tech world is still buzzing over the recent release of the Kindle 2 from Amazon which is a much slimmer and sleeker device than it's predecessor.

New features have been emerging with this revamped Kindle including a much thinner body, a larger screen, reworked keyboard buttons, better battery life, a faster processing speed, greater storage capacity, and the new text-to-speech option at the click of a button. 

This new text-to-speech feature has been gaining quite a bit of attention due to the new advancements in the somewhat dated technology. Nuance is a technology company that specializes in text-to-speech for various applications however it seems that they were the company that did Amazon's new feature on the Kindle 2. The latest version of this is the most human yet and voice samples can be found around the internet, the most intriguing of which being 'Tom', the selected voice to read from the Kindle 2, clears his throat and laughs as well as speaking, at least somewhat, like a real human. His voice rises at the end of phrases when asking a question and has such characterization that makes it sound like the most real android speech-to-text reader that we have seen yet surface in the technology world.

The Kindle 2 is available now for pre-order from Amazon.com for the somewhat stiff price tag of $359.00 and is officially released on February 24th. We'll see just how much this new gadget catches on in the coming weeks once orders start being filled.