Apple’s new talking iPod Shuffle can read aloud the names of your songs and your playlists. Although speech synthesis is nothing new, how can Apple bring such advanced features to such a tiny device? The answer is they didn’t - not really. Once again, Apple has innovated through integration of existing technology.

The new talking iPod Shuffle, like all iPods, requires a connection to iTunes in order to operate properly. With the new talking iPod, Apple has cleverly deployed a new version of iTunes to implant voice recordings into the new iPod.

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As your iPod is being populated with your songs and playlists, iTunes is also quickly recording the names of your songs and playlists using text to speech synthesis and copying these recordings onto your iPod. Text to speech is a standard software component that is built into every copy of Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows and it is easy enough for Apple to harness that existing pre-installed software or simply bundle the same code inside iTunes. iTunes was already a large application, so there’s really no limit to what Apple can embed into it.

iPods have a simple database of sorts which indexes the recordings stored on them. The database also tracks the frequency at which songs are selected and played by the user. Now, Apple has modified the internal database to additionally index the voice recording of each song title and each playlist title.

Once again, Apple has fascinated the world with its innovation through integration.

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