Kulturnyheterna has previously reported serious errors in talking books from the Swedish Agency for Accessible Media, MTM.

Then it was about readers who fall asleep, skip chapters or pronounce words incorrectly.

But many talking books are not read by humans.

Instead, the authority uses speech synthesis, ie a computer voice.

The technology was used in the majority (just over 60 percent) of the read course literature for the University of 2020.

"Impossible to hear"

Several borrowers have contacted Kulturnyheterna and are dissatisfied with how speech synthesis works.

They tell about wrong words and chapters that are thrown around.

The computer voice is sometimes of such low quality that it is almost impossible to hear what is being said.

- There are no nuances in the speech and the words are distorted.

It often leads to misinterpretation and that you do not understand the meaning of the sentences, says Madeleine Linder

"Risk not understanding"

Thaer Tomma is studying law at Lund University.

He talks about incomprehensible abbreviations, distorted English pronunciations and sometimes outright inaccuracies: exchanging words and paragraphs that are missing.

- I would like to see that the books are quality assured and reviewed properly.

You should not have to risk not understanding, he says.

The law education involves large amounts of text, something that becomes tiring in the long run.

- A bad voice that rabbles footnotes, numbers and such means that reading does not flow.

It becomes very choppy and you lose concentration.

But the advantage of speech synthesis is that it works well to increase the reading speed.

MTM: "Of course regrettable"

MTM does not want to stand for an interview but apologizes for the errors in an email to Kulturnyheterna.

It is written that the technology unfortunately has its limitations, but that it uses Sweden's best speech synthesis.

"It is of course regrettable that the synthetic voice is not always able to distinguish between different words.

Unfortunately, all Swedish speech synthesis voices have this problem ", writes Christina Tånnander, speech technologist at MTM.

The speech synthesis means that the books can be read faster and the authority also writes that the number of reported complaints is low.

"We make 900-1000 books with speech synthesis per year and receive complaints from about one reader a month and then fix the book," writes Christina Tånnander.

But Madeleine Linder believes that the dark figure is large.

There is a resignation among the authority's borrowers, she says.

- The mistakes are so many that you can not bear it.

I should not have to call in every time and say "now it says so or so".

It should be obvious that it should work.