iPod Shuffle’s VoiceOver is Multilingual

Something that surprised me about the VoiceOver feature in the new iPod Shuffles is the apparent linguistic intelligence:

iTunes automatically selects the language and best voice for your song titles and artist names. It looks at song data, like the title, artist, and album information, then applies intelligent algorithms to choose the right language.

This feature is entirely lacking in Leopard’s built in text to speech functionality. Now that it’s made its way into iTunes, however, my bet is that it will be featured system wide in Snow Leopard.

Here is a sampling of playlists being read in a few different languages. Note the woman’s voice as well.