Of the cool—and for many, extremely useful—features of the new iPod nano is the ability to have menu names spoken to you. For those with vision impairments or disabilities, this can be crucial to the mere operation of the iPod. To others, who might prefer to navigate the menu system by sound instead of looking at the screen, it might be convenience.
However, by default Spoken Menus is not enabled on the iPod nano. And there’s a reason for that. The way the system works is that it generates audio clips of not just all the menus on the iPod, but also track names, artists, albums, etc, and then syncs them to your iPod. Of course, all those sound files add up, meaning that not only does it take up extra space on your nano, it also increases sync times, generating new sound files if you add new music.
In order to actually turn on Spoken Menus, you’ll need to sync your iPod with your computer, click the “Enable spoken menus for accessibility” checkbox in the Summary tab, and hit Apply. The fine print tells us that the system will use the voice that you’ve got selected in Apple’s Universal Access preference pane (or Windows’s Text to Speech), and that while Spoken Menus are available in many different languages, they’re not available for all. Macworld’s own Dan Frakes, who’s subjecting the new nano to all sorts of tests, informs me that the Spoken Menus from the same problems you might run into with Text to Speech on your Mac—though it can apparently correctly pronounce Björk. I bet you it can pronounce “Bono” too.
Now if Apple would just use this feature to give the screen-lacking Shuttle playlists. A button or spring-return on the on switch would move through the playlists, with the voice telling us where where were. After a few seconds that playlist would play.
The larger the storage on the Shuttle gets, the more users need playlists for different moods.
How does it pronounce Bjork? It's supposed to be pronounced "Byerk", like jerk.
stupid me, not testing before commenting. Bono and Bjork sound... what americans think they should sound like, at least... when using say bjork and say bono at the command line.