How soon until we get “Celebrity” VoiceOver for iPod Shuffle?

I just watched the intro movie for the new iPod Shuffle with its VoiceOver feature and it made me curious. Depending on what OS is running on the computer to which it’s sync’d, you get a different quality of artificial voice. On OS X Leopard you get “Alex” which, while quite good, still sounds pretty awful to me. On OS X Tiger or, Windows you get something of even lower quality. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I can’t stand listening to the current generation of text to speech (though I certain understand how incredibly useful it is).

At any rate, this must certainly mean that the text to speech processing is taking place in iTunes and the resulting audio files are being synced to the iPod.

So, I wonder how long it will take before the artists themselves will be able to record their own “announcements” of the songs title and have them embedded in the audio file itself (using the ID3 standard) for use with the VoiceOver system.

Of course this wouldn’t handle the voicing of playlists, but at least it would add a fun new twist to the use of VoiceOver.

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