China Deal Gives Apple Big Market to Court

On Sunday, Apple and China Mobile announced a deal to bring the iPhone to the Chinese carrier, the largest wireless network in the world, on Jan. 17.

An agreement with China Mobile could, at least initially, give Apple a big lift into the vast Chinese market, analysts say, increasing its worldwide sales.

“China is an extremely important market for Apple and our partnership with China Mobile presents us the opportunity to bring iPhone to the customers of the world’s largest network,” Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said in a statement.

But the company will face many challenges in capturing the Chinese market.

While Apple’s smartphones are dominant in the United States and a major player in Europe, the company has struggled to gain much traction in China, where phones using Google’s Android operating system dominate for several reasons, particularly price.

In China, some smartphone makers, like Huawei, Coolpad and ZTE, offer Android phones for less than $100, while Apple lists the iPhone 5C at $739, and the 5S at $871. Apple said that it would reveal pricing of the iPhones for China Mobile customers at a later date.

Apple is the No. 5 smartphone player in the country, behind Samsung and the Chinese handset makers Huawei, Lenovo and Yulong.

The slow sales of the iPhone in China are reflected in the overall shrinkage of the company’s share of the global smartphone market — to 12.1 percent in the third quarter, down from 14.3 percent in the same period a year ago, according to the market research firm Gartner. Meanwhile, Lenovo, the No. 3 player, which sells the vast majority of its smartphones in China, had 5.1 percent of the global market in the third quarter, from 4.1 percent a year ago. Samsung’s global share remained flat at 32.1 percent.

Still, analysts were optimistic that Apple would sell a lot of phones through China Mobile, though they offered wide-ranging estimates for how many more. William V. Power, an analyst for Robert W. Baird & Company, said Apple could sell as many as 30 million more iPhones in 2014, while Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein research, offered a more conservative estimate of 15 million iPhones.

Apple sold about 23 million iPhones in China over the last year, Mr. Sacconaghi said.

Apple has long pursued a deal with China Mobile. The carrier showed signs of warming up to Apple only after it began losing customers to competitors that offered the iPhone. The No. 2 carrier in the country, China Unicom, and China Telecom, No. 3, have had longstanding arrangements with Apple, but they are much smaller than China Mobile.

In addition to cost, another reason Android phones have proved so popular in China is that, unlike in the rest of the world, there is a wider variety of mobile applications for Android phones than for iPhones. While the Google Play store is not officially available in China, Android users can turn to dozens of alternative app stores offering licensed and pirated applications.

Analysts expect the vast majority of smartphone growth in China to occur at the lower end of the market, as the phones become more widely available to lower-income consumers in smaller cities and rural areas. Those consumers will presumably be more attracted to the lower-cost Android phones.

Also, in China fewer handsets are subsidized by mobile carriers than in the United States, Europe or Japan. More than two-thirds of Chinese phones are sold unsubsidized by third-party retailers, often over the Internet.

Chinese operators are reluctant to subsidize phones too heavily in a market where many customers are happy with smartphones that cost under $100. Both China Unicom and China Telecom have been cutting back on subsidies.

Apple surprised some analysts in September with its aggressive pricing of the iPhone 5C, which has fewer features and costs less than the 5S, though the two were introduced on the same day. The company had been expected to try to appeal to Chinese customers with the lower price, but the 5C was introduced at a level that remains high in China.

Analysts say Apple may have to cut the price further, or introduce another, less expensive model if it hopes to broaden its appeal in China.

The cost-consciousness of Chinese consumers extends to their choice of mobile networks. Only 176 million China Mobile customers, less than a quarter of the total, subscribe to the company’s high-speed wireless data service, using 3G technology.

Apple and China Mobile announced their partnership a few days after China Mobile introduced an upgrade to a newer, faster system — 4G — for parts of its network. The existing 3G subscribers, not the overall customer base, will provide the main target audience for the new phones and services.

The deal with China Mobile has been rumored for a while, and potential customers for the iPhone are already lining up. Among them is Wang Xiaocong, who works in the marketing department of a law firm in Beijing. Ms. Wang, 31, said she had a BlackBerry for work and a Samsung smartphone for personal use, but was looking for something different.

“I am not a big fan of high-tech products,” Ms. Wang said. “But I would love to have an iPhone next time, with the 4G network, maybe next year. It looks very fashionable.”

Shanshan Wang contributed reporting.

E-Book Ruling Gives Amazon an Advantage

A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Apple had illegally conspired with five of the six biggest publishers to try to raise prices in the budding e-books market.

The decision came two days after Barnes & Noble lost its chief executive and said it would not appoint another, signaling that the biggest chain of physical bookstores could be immediately broken up.

The verdict in the Apple case might have been a foregone conclusion, telegraphed by the judge herself, but it emphatically underlined how the traditional players in the book business have been upended. Only Amazon, led by Mr. Bezos, seems to have a plan. He is executing it with a skill that infuriates his competitors and rewards his stockholders.

“We’re at a moment when cultural power is passing to new gatekeepers,” said Joe Esposito, a publishing consultant. “Heaven forbid that we should have the government telling our entrepreneurs what to do, but there is a social policy issue here. We don’t want the companies to become a black hole that absorbs all light except their own.”

The Apple case, which was brought by the Justice Department, will have little immediate impact on the selling of books. The publishers settled long ago, protesting they had done nothing wrong but saying they could not afford to fight the government. But it might be a long time before they try to take charge of their fate again in such a bold fashion. Drawing the attention of the government once was bad enough; twice could be a disaster.

“The Department of Justice has unwittingly caused further consolidation in the industry at a time when consolidation is not necessarily a good thing,” said Mark Coker, the chief executive of Smashwords, an e-book distributor. “If you want a vibrant ecosystem of multiple publishers, multiple publishing methods and multiple successful retailers in 5, 20 or 50 years, we took a step backwards this week.”

Some in publishing suspected that Amazon had prompted the government to file its suit. The retailer has denied it, but it still emerged the big winner. While Apple will be punished — damages are yet to be decided — and the publishers were chastened, Amazon is left free to exert its dominance over e-books — even as it gains market share with physical books. The retailer declined to comment on Wednesday.

“Amazon is not in most of the headlines, but all of the big events in the book world are about Amazon,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “If the publishers colluded, it was to blunt Amazon’s dominance. Barnes & Noble’s troubles may stem from a misstep with its Nook tablets, just as Borders’ bankruptcy might have been hastened by management mistakes, but its precarious position is that of any rent-paying retailer facing a deep-pocketed virtual competitor.”

Last week, Penguin and Random House officially merged, creating a publishing behemoth that might be able to determine its future rather than suffer the fate of Barnes & Noble, a once-swaggering entity that now seems adrift. Random House was not a target of the Justice Department; Penguin was.

Penguin and Random House were innovators who made paperbacks into a disruptive force in the 1940s and ’50s. They were the Amazons of their era, making the traditional book business deeply uneasy. No less an authority than George Orwell thought paperbacks were of so much better value than hardbacks that they spelled the ruination of publishing and bookselling. “The cheaper books become,” he wrote, “the less money is spent on books.”

Orwell was wrong, but the same arguments are being made against Amazon and e-books today. Amazon executives are not much for public debate, but they argue that all this disruption will ultimately give more money to more authors and make more books more widely available to more people at cheaper prices, and who could argue with any of that?

This was not a prospect that many on Wednesday were putting much faith in.

Amazon, its detractors argue, is not a nonprofit or public trust but a hard-nosed company whose investors hope will make lots of money someday soon. It shares closed Wednesday at $292.33, a record.

“The Justice Department’s guns seem pointed in the wrong direction,” Mr. Aiken said.

But the more pressing concern for the industry is the fate of Barnes & Noble. When Borders collapsed two years ago, analysts said there was an unexpected consequence to the loss of 400 stores: the e-book growth rate began to taper off, as readers could no longer examine new titles before ordering them from Amazon.

E-books, in other words, were not a magical technology that could shed all the existing infrastructure of publishing. They needed the existing ecosystem.

“If all of those corporate outlets vanish, there is suddenly a hell of a lot less space devoted to showcasing a large number of titles,” said J. B. Dickey, owner of the Seattle Mystery Bookshop. “We’ll probably see a continuing shrinking in print runs, maybe fewer titles published, fewer authors published and the New York houses retreating into the known best-sellers. Which means more novice and midlist authors scrambling to find a way to stay in print and more authors self-publishing their print books — or more likely releasing their works as e-files.”

All of that sounds dire. Perhaps the only consolation for those who fear the power of Amazon is the knowledge that all companies eventually peak, no matter how unlikely that seems when they are in the ascendance.

Mr. Esposito, the consultant, remembered that 30 years ago there was a book called “The Media Monopoly,” which worried about the excessive power of the Gannett chain of newspapers as well as the three major television networks.

“The book reads almost quaint now,” Mr. Esposito said.

Gadgetwise: Karma Hotspot Gives Out Free Data

The Karma Hotspot gives you free data each time you allow someone to share your hotspot.

I hate when products make me a shill by alerting everyone on Facebook when I use them. Maybe I don’t want to share what pictures I’ve viewed on EyeEm, and I certainly don’t want Spotify telling anyone I listened to the Archies.

Which makes the Karma Hotspot somewhat confounding. It appears to be one of those apps that overshares, but it isn’t.

The Karma Hotspot acts as a go-between to connect a Wi-Fi phone, tablet or computer to the Web using the mobile phone network. It gives away data – 100 megabytes’ worth – when you sign up, and each time you allow someone to share your hotspot. That 100 megabytes is equivalent to downloading about 300 e-mails or 15 good-quality three-and-a-half minute songs.

To make joining easy, Karma’s registration is through Facebook. All you need is an e-mail address and a Facebook password, and you’re in. In fact, you can’t currently sign up without a Facebook account. The company said it was working on an alternative.

Here is where the confusion comes in. When you sign up with any app through Facebook, it asks if you want to allow the app – in this case Karma – to share information. If you say yes, you will see a message telling you that Karma can share posts on your timeline. That makes it look as if it will.

But, although the mechanism is there to share, said Robert Gaal, Karma’s chief executive, the app doesn’t send any automatic notifications, so it doesn’t matter. In a test, Karma sent no unwanted alerts.

To be doubly sure, you can take another step to protect your privacy in  Karma’s Facebook settings. Look for the little gear icon in the upper right corner of your Facebook home page. Click it for a drop-down menu, and choose “account settings.” Look for the list marked “apps,” and click.

Where you see Karma, click on “edit.” That should open a list of options, with “Visibility of app” at the top. Click on the drop-down menu there and choose “Only Me.”

That should ensure that no automatic posts go out.

As for how the app works after the sign-up, the data speed at my desk wasn’t blazing. Although the device promises 4G speeds where available, my average was 1.8 megabits per second, which is less than half the speed I average on the AT&T LTE network, and was too slow to run YouTube videos without periodic freezes.

The roughly 3-inch-square Karma hotspot hardware costs $80. If you just want to buy data without signing up friends, it’s $14 per gigabyte.

Gadgetwise Blog: A Crowd Service Gives Tips on Cloud Service

If you are looking for a cloud service, 50,000 friends would like to help you out.

The Web site Fixya, best described as a volunteer technical assistance forum, assessed more than 50,000 support requests to find the most common problems with five cloud services. Roughly 40,000 were about Apple’s iCloud; the rest were nearly evenly distributed among the others.

Among Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, SugarSync and Box, each had some technical difficulties, but the one that received the most positive feedback from Fixya users is the lesser known SugarSync.

And good news for users: While SugarSync was already was considered easy to use by the Fixya community, SugarSync has recently been redesigned to be simpler still.

There is one large fly in the SugarSync ointment. It won’t work with QuickBooks, a problem that was the top query for SugarSync.

Dropbox was cited by 40 percent of its audience for security concerns, followed by 25 percent for storage limits and 15 percent for syncing issues.

Google Drive drew 30 percent of its questions about missing folders, followed by 20 percent for syncing issues.

After upgrading to Apple’s Mountain Lion operating system, 35 percent of iCloud users sought answers about syncing between Apple devices, while 25 percent had problems syncing with non-Apple devices.

Box users required help with uploading 25 percent of the time, cited security issues 25 percent of the time and asked about backup failures 20 percent of the time.

The entire report with solutions for the most common problems of each service can be found on FixYa’s blog.

Earnings Report Gives Yahoo’s New Chief a Good Start

Yahoo reported stronger earnings than a year earlier, but future growth remained uncertain. “We have a fundamental foundation on which to grow,” Ms. Mayer said in a conference call with analysts. “We believe Yahoo’s best days lie ahead. We intend to win.”

Largely because of a long-awaited sale of its stake in Alibaba last month, Yahoo reported Monday that net income in the third quarter, which ended Sept. 30, rose sharply to $3.16 billion, or $2.64 a share, from $293 million, or 23 cents a share, in the same quarter a year ago. That included a net gain of $2.8 billion related to the Alibaba sale and restructuring charges of $16 million, the company said.

That news sent Yahoo’s shares up 4 percent in after-hours trading, but some analysts were less sanguine. “Earnings were decent — hooray! — the wheels didn’t come off the bus,” said Colin Gillis, an Internet analyst with BCG Partners. “But there are still some serious issues facing her.”

Those problems start with the company’s stagnant revenue, which was $1.2 billion in the quarter. Its income from operations decreased 14 percent, to $152 million from $177 million in the year earlier period.

With 700 million users each month, Yahoo remains one of the most visited sites on the Web, but it has been ceding its share of the online display ad market to rivals like Facebook and Google.

Its search business, which Yahoo outsourced to Microsoft in 2009, is on its last legs, propped up only because of a revenue-guarantee clause in its contract with Microsoft.

In the call with analysts, Ms. Mayer acknowledged that Yahoo’s search deal with Microsoft had been disappointing. “We’ve experienced some disappointment on the monetization, which is why the revenue guarantee is in place,” she said. Yahoo’s revenue guarantee expires in March. Without the guarantee, Yahoo’s revenue could fall next year by $100 million.

Ms. Mayer, who joined the company in July after 13 years at Google, said Yahoo’s top priority was to “make the world’s daily habits inspiring and entertaining.” She said Yahoo would renew its focus on its search business, modernize its home page, mail and messenger services, develop a mobile presence and seek out “double-digit million-dollar” acquisitions.

She said the company was “very well-positioned” to capitalize on the shift of consumers to mobile devices. Noting that the most frequent use of smartphones was checking weather, sports scores, financial information, watching videos, sharing photos, getting news and playing games, she asked, “Does that sound like any particular company that you know?”

To lure engineers to the company and to improve employee morale, one of the first things Ms. Mayer did was offer free cafeteria food and give employees the option to trade in their BlackBerry phones for iPhones and Android-powered smartphones.

“Cultural change can’t be bought and the vast majority of what we’ve done has cost nothing,” Ms. Mayer said of those moves. “I’m already impressed in the change in our applicant pool.”

Twitter Gives Saudi Arabia a Revolution of Its Own

Open criticism of this country’s royal family, once unheard-of, has become commonplace in recent months. Prominent judges and lawyers issue fierce public broadsides about large-scale government corruption and social neglect. Women deride the clerics who limit their freedoms. Even the king has come under attack.

All this dissent is taking place on the same forum: Twitter.

Unlike other media, Twitter has allowed Saudis to cross social boundaries and address delicate subjects collectively and in real time, via shared subject headings like “Saudi Corruption” and “Political Prisoners,” known in Twitter as hashtags.

With so many people writing mostly under their real names — there are some 2.9 million users in the kingdom, according to one recent study, and it is the world’s fastest-growing Twitter zone — the authorities appear to have thrown their hands up.

“Twitter for us is like a parliament, but not the kind of parliament that exists in this region,” said Faisal Abdullah, a 31-year-old lawyer. “It’s a true parliament, where people from all political sides meet and speak freely.”

Whether all this talk will lead to real change is hard to say. Some skeptics see the government’s unexpected tolerance as a deliberate ploy to let people blow off steam, not so different from the billions of dollars the government spent on social welfare programs last year in the wake of the Arab uprisings: anything to quell a real rebellion. In a country where public entertainment and street life, let alone protests, scarcely exist, and few people socialize outside their families, social media fills a crying need.

Still, the sudden lifting of taboos on public criticism has been remarkable in its own right. It has revealed, among other things, a striking depth of anger at the royal family that cuts across the political spectrum and has led some Saudis to wonder how long this deeply conservative and seemingly placid society can survive without serious reform.

“Twitter has revealed a great frustration and a popular refusal of the current situation,” said Salman al-Awda, a prominent cleric who was jailed for several years in the 1990s for his attacks on the government and is now seen as a moderate. He has more than 1.6 million followers on Twitter.

“There is a complete gap between the rulers and the ruled,” he said. “Even those who are in charge of security do not know what the people really think, and this is not good.”

The most flagrant criticism of the royal family by far has come from a single mysterious person named Mujtahidd. (The word means “studious.”) Starting late last year, Mujtahidd began posting sensational and richly detailed accusations about corrupt arms deals, construction boondoggles and back-room power plays involving numerous royals, including King Abdullah. He often writes directly to the Twitter accounts of the alleged malefactors.

“Is it true that your house in Jedda cost $1 billion but you charged $6 billion and pocketed the rest?” he wrote early this year to Prince Abdul Aziz bin Fahd, one of his favorite targets. There is no way to verify any of his claims, but the royal family clearly takes him seriously, writing heated denials. He now has more than 660,000 followers.

The royal family is said to have made strenuous efforts to uncover Mujtahidd’s identity, to no avail. He is widely rumored to be an alienated member of the royal family, or someone relaying information from such insiders.

In the meantime, Mujtahidd appears to have emboldened many other Saudis.

The annual National Day holiday last month, for instance, elicited a gale of criticism. On the day before the holiday, the interior minister, Prince Ahmed bin Abdul Aziz, released a statement noting that “we enjoy a luxurious lifestyle.” The statement was meant to be patriotic.

Google Deal Gives Publishers a Choice: Digitize or Not

It was a small step forward for Google’s plan to digitize every book and make them readable and searchable online, known as the Google Library Project, but it did not resolve the much bigger issue standing in Google’s way — litigation between Google and authors.

Though the settlement will not change much about the way that Google and publishers already partner, it is the newest signpost for defining copyright in the Internet age. It is also the latest evidence of the shift to e-books from print, and of Google’s efforts to compete with e-book rivals like Amazon.com. Digital books were a new and daunting prospect when the publishers first sued Google seven years ago, but they have now become commonplace.

“They had this lawsuit hanging around for years, and basically the publishers have all moved on,” said James Grimmelmann, a professor at New York Law School who has closely followed the case. “They are selling digitally now. That’s the future. This just memorializes the transition.”

Thursday’s agreement, between Google and the Association of American Publishers, had been expected since last year. The publishers involved in the settlement are the McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education, the Penguin Group, John Wiley & Sons and Simon & Schuster.

The deal allows publishers to choose whether to allow Google to digitize their out-of-print books that are still under copyright protection. If Google does so, it will also provide them with a digital copy for their own use, perhaps to sell on their Web sites.

For books that it has digitized, Google allows people to read 20 percent of them online and purchase the entire books from the Google Play store, and it shares revenue with the publishers. The two parties did not disclose additional financial terms of the agreement, but the publishers had not asked for monetary damages.

Google has been offering publishers the opportunity to sell digital books for years, and digitizing new books has become routine for publishers. But under the settlement, publishers get the benefit of Google digitizing out-of-print books that they might not otherwise have turned into e-books. Meanwhile, Google can expand the library of e-books it sells to consumers.

“What’s really exciting about today’s settlement is the fact that Google will be getting access to books that have long been out of print, that are in copyright,” said Tom Turvey, director of strategic partnerships at Google. “It’s good for users who weren’t able to buy them before, and for publishers.”

The settlement does not answer the question at the heart of the litigation between Google and publishers and authors — whether Google is infringing copyright by digitizing books. It essentially allows both sides to agree to disagree, and gives publishers the right to keep their books out of Google’s reach.

“We’re very pleased because the settlement acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright holders and publishers, and whether they’re going to make their rights available,” said Tom Allen, chief executive of the Association of American Publishers. But the bigger case, between Google and the Authors Guild, remains tied up in court. An agreement between those two parties will determine whether Google can move forward with its broader, more ambitious digitizing plan.

“That’s the lawsuit with high stakes,” Mr. Grimmelmann said.

The settlement with the publishers could help Google in that litigation, he said. “Maybe the fact that the publishers don’t think this is a lawsuit worth pursuing will help Google slightly,” he said.

The Authors Guild, once a partner of the publishers against Google, said Thursday that the publishers’ settlement did not resolve any of its issues with Google’s book-scanning project.

“The publishers’ private settlement, whatever its terms, does not resolve the authors’ copyright infringement claims against Google,” Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, said in a statement. “Google continues to profit from its use of millions of copyright-protected books without regard to authors’ rights, and our class-action lawsuit on behalf of U.S. authors continues.”

The settlement also did not address the difficult issue of so-called orphan works — those that are still under copyright but whose copyright holder or author cannot be found.

The groups representing authors and publishers sued Google in 2005, arguing that its digital book-scanning violated their copyrights. After years of litigation, they agreed to a $125 million settlement, but it was rejected last year by a federal judge, Denny Chin, who said it went too far and raised copyright, antitrust and other concerns.

After that, the publishers and authors, who had partnered when negotiating with Google, split. While the authors remain in court, the publishers reached the agreement with Google privately, so it is not subject to court approval.

Julie Bosman contributed reporting from New York.

Bits Blog: A New Google App Gives You Local Information - Before You Ask for It

Google has created a new mobile app that gives people facts about the places around them — unprompted, without the need to even ask for the information.

The app, Field Trip, offers historical trivia about a park, an architectural factoid about a building or reviews of a nearby restaurant. Google says it’s like having a local friend with you as you make your way through a city.

“The idea behind the app was to build something that would help people connect with the real, physical world around them,” said John Hanke, a vice president of product at Google who runs a small lab at the company building location-based and social mobile apps. “It’s always running in the background, so it knows where you are and is always looking to see if something interesting is in your immediate physical environment.”

While the app might seem small, it reveals a lot about the big directions Google wants to go.

Google, along with other companies and researchers, dreams of so-called ubiquitous computing or ambient intelligence — computers woven into the texture of life as opposed to being separate machines. Eventually, the theory goes, computers will be part of the environment, know where people are and anticipate what they want to know.

The Field Trip app is a small step in that direction, and an example of what Google is capable of doing. Another is Google Glass, the Internet-connected eyeglass frames with a small screen. With Field Trip, Google is trying to move beyond the first generation of mobile apps, which were not much more than desktop transplants, Mr. Hanke said.

Google wants to “move the device out of your way and put the information front and center,” he said, so people can “scan the environment and know what the Web knows about the places around you.”

Fans of “Iron Man,” “The Terminator” or William Gibson’s science fiction will recognize this idea of augmented reality, he said. “What we’re doing is essentially building the information framework and tools to enable that kind of experience in the future.”

More immediately, Field Trip is a big step toward helping Google get its services and ads in front of mobile users. While it has long been a dream of advertising companies to deliver ads to people on their phones when they are near a business, that is still relatively rare. But with Field Trip, Google is able to show restaurant reviews from its Zagat service or sell deals from Google Offers or city tours from Vayable, all based on a person’s location.

In addition to Google’s own services, most of the information in Field Trip comes from a few dozen publishing partners, some esoteric, including Arcadia Publishing, Atlas Obscura, Curbed, Eater and Cool Hunting.

Field Trip uses signals from nearby cellphone towers to determine a user’s location. Its users can choose from which publishers they receive alerts — so they could turn off alerts for Google Offers, for instance — and how frequently they want to receive them. They can also choose not to receive alerts, in which case they open the app to find information.

Users can also ask Field Trip to read them notifications if the phone is connected to a headset or Bluetooth or if they are driving — and the app will determine on its own that they are driving based on how fast they are moving.

Mr. Hanke, who co-founded Keyhole, a mapping start-up that Google bought to help it develop maps, was the head of Google Maps for several years. Last year, he decided he wanted to leave Google to found another start-up. But Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, persuaded him to stay, Mr. Hanke said, and start a small lab in San Francisco. He named it Niantic Labs, after a ship that traveled to San Francisco during the Gold Rush.

Field Trip is available for Android phones; Google is working on an iPhone version. To introduce the app, Google on Saturday is playing host at parties in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago and Minneapolis for people to explore the cities. Attendance is free. Registration is at FieldTripDay.com.

Evolving Technology Gives True Voices to Children Who Cannot Speak

Enrique has Down syndrome and speech apraxia, which means that he cannot speak, aside from a few grunts and “Ma” in the word “Mama.” He was able to speak to his brother, though, with an iPad loaded with the latest version of a widely used text-to-speech application, Proloquo2Go.

“The voice now matches the boy,” said John Mendez, Enrique’s father.

Until recently, devices that help children like Enrique speak used modified adult voices. The effect can be startling to those listening because it doesn’t sound like a child’s voice. Most existing children’s voices sound “like adults on helium,” said David Niemeijer, chief executive and lead developer at AssistiveWare, which developed the software Enrique tested.

AssistiveWare and its partner, Acapela Group, developed the next version, Proloquo2Go 2.1, which features two children’s voices — known as Josh and Ella — actually recorded by children. The $190 application can be bought on iTunes Wednesday, but people who already own the app can add the latest voices at no charge.

Few, if any, other companies offer true children’s voices, largely because of the challenges of recording children. The average 10-year-old cannot spend hundreds of hours in a sound booth recording the library of phrases needed to create a synthetic child’s voice.

Sound engineering can manipulate adult voices, adding filters that adjust for the higher pitch of a child’s voice, for example. But without a baseline recording, the voices to date have lacked the natural sound of a child’s voice. With little competitive pressure to replicate children’s voices, most companies decided children could get by with the altered adult voices.

The release of Proloquo2Go’s boy and girl voices — the company also has two other children’s voices with a British accent for that market — is an indicator of new progress in the decades-old text-to-speech industry.

The progress is, in part, a side effect of the adoption of automated voices in everything from credit card company service lines to the grocery store checkout kiosk. But faster computer processors with more memory have empowered sound engineers to make artificial voices sound more human. Many of the larger voice companies like Nuance, in Massachusetts, and Ivona, in Poland, now offer voices in multiple languages and accents.

Proloquo2Go, which runs on Apple’s mobile devices, is used by tens of thousands of children with disabilities like autism and cerebral palsy. The company estimates that 80 percent of its users are under 18 years old and 60 percent are under 11. The new voices are for children ages 6 to 14. In December, Acapela Group will begin licensing the voices to companies for use on other devices.

Proloquo to go “can be a good fit for some people, but not for everyone,” said Janice C. Light, a professor of communication sciences and disorders at Pennsylvania State University.

Said Mr. Niemeijer, the AssistiveWare chief: “You definitely need to look at the child and think about what would be a good situation. A degree of assessment is definitely necessary because the parents often just go out and buy the device and it doesn’t work out. Parents often have too high hopes.”

When Shanay Finney, 30, learned that her 10-year-old autistic son Dahmier might be able to have an age-appropriate voice, she reacted with mixed emotions. On one hand, when he goes to the store and interacts with people in public, the sound of his voice would be more normal, but on the other hand, all the other little boys using Proloquo2Go would have the same voice.

“I’m going to keep it real,” she said. “It’s not my son’s voice. But I know it might help.”

The software cost AssistiveWare about $100,000 to develop. During the recording sessions for Proloquo2Go 2.1, audio engineers collected several thousand phrases and hundreds of words, including profanity, which Mr. Niemeijer believes is a step toward empowering children who cannot speak, giving them the same vocabulary as their peers.

From this bank of words, the application can synthesize any word in the English language. For example the word “impressive” is stitched together from the words impossible, president and detective.

Most text-to-speech devices do give users the ability to say almost anything, and many allow users to choose whether they want to sound happy, angry or sad. The challenge facing the industry, whose biennial conference starts Saturday in Pittsburgh, is how to develop text-to-speech technologies that can predict the emotion, or tone, a person might want to use in a given situation.

Many in the industry and other experts in the field agree that a synthetic voice, even one that expresses basic emotions, is barely adequate to allow someone with a speech disability to speak normally, let alone have a sense of individuality.

“When we’re in conversation, we use tone of voice for all kinds of things, to express respect, gratitude, to influence the way a conversation goes backwards and forwards,” said Graham Pullin, the designer behind a pilot project called Speech Hedge, which is aimed at molding the tone of a person’s voice.

“You often can’t really chip in sharp/sarcastic comments,” wrote Martin Pistorius, a 36-year-old Web developer and author, in an e-mail. He lost his voice after contracting meningitis when he was 12 and has been using text-to-speech technology for 10 years. “By the time you’ve composed it, the moment has gone so it wouldn’t really be funny or appropriate any more.”

“I’m pretty quick at getting my message out, but even so I still can’t keep up with the pace of normal conversation,” he wrote.