Amazon's Kindle can't say "Obama"

There are the usual technology bugs, and then there are high-tech embarrassments that are way out of the ordinary. This one is perhaps the strangest quirk I've heard of since reading the story of a user whose bracelet with a magnetic clasp was tricking her notebook into thinking the lid was closed, but this one's far more humiliating for the manufacturer than a little jewelry snafu. Namely: Amazon's vaunted Kindle can't properly pronounce the name of the President of the United States.

That's a bit of a problem when you're positioning your product as a replacement for newspapers -- where coverage of the President is a daily event -- and touting its read-aloud system as well.

The New York Times (no stranger to writing about the Prez) says that the name "Barack Obama," when read aloud by the Kindle's computerized text-to-speech system, sounds something like "Brack Alabama."

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos laughed about the gaffe, calling it "unfortunate," but the company has nonetheless hustled out a fix via its text-to-speech partner Nuance, which promises to correct the pronunciation of the name. That patch will be delivered wirelessly to Kindles automatically in the near future, if it hasn't already.

No word, however, on how the Kindle handles the pronunciation of the words "Ahmadinejad," "Schwarzenegger," "Guantanamo," or "nuclear."

Of course, the Kindle hardly marks the first time Obama's name has given someone trouble. For your Friday afternoon amusement, take a trip back to 2004, when Obama was a brand new kid on the political block, when David Letterman offered the inevitable "Top Ten Ways to Mispronounce Barack Obama." Kindle's unique spin on the name, alas, doesn't make the list.