You should listen to the audio of this story, rather than reading it (obviously). It has nice samples of an actual Kindle voice.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101585667

“Imagine Gilbert Gottfried laid up with a tuberculin cough. No, that would still be more pleasant than listening to the Kindle, which sounds like a dyslexic robot who spent his formative years in Eastern Europe.”

Read Me a Story, Mr. Roboto, from Slate.

Indeed, short of the stint where my husband had his computer ‘read’ him the required readings of most of our first year of college while playing video games I’m hard pressed to come up with a good reason to include such on a option on the Kindle.

Perhaps as Entertainment Weekly recently suggests (http://popwatch.ew.com/popwatch/2009/02/score-one-for-l.html) there may be a time when voice actors will be recruited by Kindle itself to read these works.

It is Microsoft’s Speech API. I don’t have a Kindle but would be surprised if it’s any better.

“a modern speech synthesizer” means the same one that is used in Kindle 2, or just whatever speech synthesizer you had available to try and prove your point?

I would love to hear a recording of the actual Kindle 2 narration.