Quote:
Originally Posted by Desertway
Has anyone noticed whether the text to speech options are the same on the Max as they are on previous Fire tablets? I keep hoping that Amazon will upgrade the voices for tts on the Kindle app.
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They are the same text to speech voices as my Fire HD 10, as far as I can tell (they sound exactly the same).
For reference, Kindle app is currently version
14.84.100 on both (but TTS is a system service, not part of the Kindle app).
There are evidently hacks that let you replace the default TTS engine, but for me the default engine (Ivona) is good enough, even though it does not seem to be getting updates.
Note that you can use Alexa (on Fire or Echo etc) to read books, and it evidently uses
Amazon Polly (an AWS service which is the successor to Ivona):
https://aws.amazon.com/polly/
It does sound more natural, and of course will improve over time. You can open the book with Kindle app (or Kindle) and follow along in the text. I need to figure out how to change default voice, the Alexa app is not showing me how to do it for some reason (I tap on the card and it opens an empty screen).
It would be nice if they would update the on-device voice data somehow, or let you have the Kindle app use the Amazon Polly voices directly (when on line).
Interestingly Pocketbook licenses Ivona voices for their eReaders. They support a few languages that neither Fire or Amazon Polly support (or at least Czech).