From Chana Lajcher, Jerusalem College of Technology
I can certainly understand Adoram Erell’s frustration when trying to speak Hebrew to his cellphone (1 November, p 31).
When text-to-speech was new, a few of us were playing with software that could take a text in English and read it out loud. We quickly got bored and decided to teach it to speak Hebrew. Fiddling with the transliteration I managed to make it speak well enough to be understood, but much to our amusement it had a very heavy American midwestern accent.
Jerusalem, Israel
