Amazon Echo now reads Kindle books aloud

[fjtorres]

http://www.aftvnews.com/alexa-can-no...book-chapters/

They finally got around to implementing Kindle TTS on the Alexa system.
For now, it's solely the Echo but the way Alexa is quietly spreading around, it might eventually show up on the FireTV or new Ford cars.

They also improved the controls for playback of Audible books.

[Conan46]

This is the first thing to get me to seriously consider buying an Echo. I continually use text-to-speech for books. If they could get Ivona voice engine and UK Amy voice--I'm sold

[Jack Torrance]

Maybe they have improved the TTS since my K2 or my DX, but if not.... The TTS is fine for reading the weather or a quick link but beyond that just awful.

[Conan46]

Originally Posted by Jack Torrance

Maybe they have improved the TTS since my K2 or my DX, but if not.... The TTS is fine for reading the weather or a quick link but beyond that just awful.

I think the hardware has improved to the point it is quite good. On low spec hardware it probably still has hiccups and glitches. Which makes me wonder if Echo has good enough hardware to sustain text-to-speech without glitches.

I think one of the reasons the Kindles lost speakers, and therefore the TTS feature, was that TTS was not good at all, thus many people were not that sad to see this feature go away. With Audible you get a real person who can inflect the proper tones, emotions, pauses, et cetera into the text being read, not to mention actually use proper pronunciation. With TTS you get a lot of garbage. No doubt TTS has improved and will continue to do so, but it will never come close to a real person, especially a trained voice actor, reading the book to you.

BTW, at Xmas I went over to a friend's house and they had Echo. I was not impressed. It had great difficulty interpreting what anyone said, even the owner of the device. My friend had to continually go right above it and nearly yell commands into it and even then Alexa acted like a dumb blonde quite often. His wife laughed, pulled out her iPhone and demonstrated that Siri worked a lot better than Echo/Alexa. No way I would pay $200 USD for that junk. Having purchased the useless FireTV stick last year when it was introduced, I'm not at all surprised at how bad Echo is.

[Conan46]

Originally Posted by jswinden

I think one of the reasons the Kindles lost speakers, and therefore the TTS feature, was that TTS was not good at all, thus many people were not that sad to see this feature go away. With Audible you get a real person who can inflect the proper tones, emotions, pauses, et cetera into the text being read, not to mention actually use proper pronunciation. With TTS you get a lot of garbage. No doubt TTS has improved and will continue to do so, but it will never come close to a real person, especially a trained voice actor, reading the book to you.

BTW, at Xmas I went over to a friend's house and they had Echo. I was not impressed. It had great difficulty interpreting what anyone said, even the owner of the device. My friend had to continually go right above it and nearly yell commands into it and even then Alexa acted like a dumb blonde quite often. His wife laughed, pulled out her iPhone and demonstrated that Siri worked a lot better than Echo/Alexa. No way I would pay $200 USD for that junk. Having purchased the useless FireTV stick last year when it was introduced, I'm not at all surprised at how bad Echo is.

Have you used text-to-speech in awhile? It was horrid on the Kindle Keyboard, but it comes close to natural now, especially with Ivona voices. Any tablet with at least a decent dual core CPU and 1 gig ram should do a good job. I use Google Books text-to-speech with Ivona installed with UK Amy voice and I think it does a good job. When I had my Kindle tablets, the 6 and a 7 HD both did well with text-to-speech, but if you haven't tried it in awhile you will notice a big difference. I like audiobooks, but the advantage with text-to-speech is the reading voice doesn't interpret anything, you don't get their idea of what a character's voice sounds like, or how tense a scene should be, or not. And text-to-speech reads faster, allowing me to finish books quicker. Not saying it is better, but it has advantages along with disadvantages compared to regular audiobooks.
Edit: BTW I use either headphones or bluetooth speakers, and that makes a huge difference. On board speakers are often horrible on tablets.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by Conan46

I think the hardware has improved to the point it is quite good. On low spec hardware it probably still has hiccups and glitches. Which makes me wonder if Echo has good enough hardware to sustain text-to-speech without glitches.

It has a 1GHz single-core CPU, 256MB RAM, and 4GB ROM. None of it expandable. Those are iPod touch 4 specs from 2010.

[fjtorres]

I don't use TTS much but on my three year old Fire it is quite good.
Not quite as good on my Win10 tablet but plenty good.
Main gripe on the HD8.9 is the speed controls aren't fine-grained enough and default speed is a bit too fast on some texts.
If Alexa is any better than that it should be fine.

Me, I'm just waiting for the Alexa update for the Fire TV stick which has proven very useful after I installed Kodi.

[Conan46]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

It has a 1GHz single-core CPU, 256MB RAM, and 4GB ROM. None of it expandable. Those are iPod touch 4 specs from 2010.

Ouch! That worries me and cools my enthusiasm. The Echo needs a serious upgrade if Amazon hopes to make it everything they seem to be aiming for. Maybe we will see a new version by the end of this year. I'm guessing lots of glitches reading long strings of text with 256 mb ram and single core
Gotta say $179 is too much for that hardware. I have nice bluetooth speakers I paid $20 for, and the bottom rung Amazon tablet has better specs at $49
Edit: Also it needs a rechargeable battery, a six foot cord doesn't cut it.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

It has a 1GHz single-core CPU, 256MB RAM, and 4GB ROM. None of it expandable. Those are iPod touch 4 specs from 2010.

No display, no graphics, and very little local processing required.
Alexa does the heavy lifting in the cloud. That's how they constantly add new features without firmware updates.

Odds are the TTS won't be running local but rather streamed.

[Conan46]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

I don't use TTS much but on my three year old Fire it is quite good.
Not quite as good on my Win10 tablet but plenty good.
Main gripe on the HD8.9 is the speed controls aren't fine-grained enough and default speed is a bit too fast on some texts.
If Alexa is any better than that it should be fine.

Me, I'm just waiting for the Alexa update for the Fire TV stick which has proven very useful after I installed Kodi.

I'm thinking the Fire TV stick could handle text-to-speech fine if they find a way to cast it from a tablet or otherwise control the function.

[Conan46]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

No display, no graphics, and very little local processing required.
Alexa does the heavy lifting in the cloud. That's how they constantly add new features without firmware updates.

Odds are the TTS won't be running local but rather streamed.

You are correct that it could get help from the cloud, Google Books offers that for phones using text-to-speech. But that hardware is almost unforgivable when you consider a Fire TV stick has "awesome hardware" compared to Echo.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by Conan46

Ouch! That worries me and cools my enthusiasm. The Echo needs a serious upgrade if Amazon hopes to make it everything they seem to be aiming for. Maybe we will see a new version by the end of this year. I'm guessing lots of glitches reading long strings of text with 256 mb ram and single core
Gotta say $179 is too much for that hardware. I have nice bluetooth speakers I paid $20 for, and the bottom rung Amazon tablet has better specs at $49

I paid $99 for mine. I use it for streaming music (Prime, Pandora, FM radio, etc) and playing Audible books. For that, it was money well spent and I'm very pleased with the playback and sound quality.

What I love most about it is that it sits there ready to play whatever I want whenever I want. I don't have to fool around setting up another device.

[Atunah]

Yay, I'll have to try this on my Echo. I for one am not a fan of audiobooks overall. I just can't get into the story like that, I tried again and again. I have a handful of them to listen to from time to time. Done that with Echo too.

But occationally I need to do something around the house and I'd still like to hear the story at the same time. Its not worth it to get expensive audio books just for that case and many of my books don't have audio books anyway. It fills a gap for me. TTS that is. The voice has gotten much better than early kindles for sure. I also prefer to listen to stories with the least amount of "drama". I think its partly the acting of the stories with audio books that keeps me from getting into them.

I also don't have any issue with my Echo not understanding me or the other member of the house. We did voice train it as its suggested at the start. Only time it has issues hearing is when we listen to surround sound stuff. Not Echo fault as one of the side speakers is 1 foot away from the Echo where it sits on a side table right now. It can't pick up my voice if a loud music sound is screaming in its ears after all.

Off to figure out how to do TTS..

[barryem]

I got an early invitation to buy the Echo and I bought it right away. I think it had been announced 3 or 4 days before I got mine. So I've had quite a bit of experience with it. However, I can't honestly say I use it much. My main use is for weather forecasts and I find it pretty handy for that. Actually my best use of it is to show it off to visitors. I've had a lot of fun with that. I'm not sure it was worth the $100 I paid for it but I've never been sorry I got it.

I find that it understands me correctly the first time about 95% of the time. I've suggested that other people give it commands and it seems to work about as well for them. The other 5% of the time simply repeating solves any problems. Now and then it simply gets it wrong.

Probably the biggest problem I've had with it is when it suddenly starts talking for no apparent reason. It doesn't happen often but now and then it does. Other than that the thing has been nearly flawless.

I just tried the TTS reading for the first time before I began typing this post. The book I picked was Michener's "Sayonara", thinking that might be a real challenge with all it's Japanese words. It didn't sound half bad as TTS goes. I'm not really interested in listening to TTS reading of books but if I had to I could enjoy this. Fortunately I don't have to.

I've followed TTS advances through the years in kind of a casual way. I used to do some contract programming on the side and one of my projects was to write a driver for an early Hitachi TTS chip which was to be used to quote stock prices on the phone to subscribers. The way it worked was that my driver had to convert text to phenomes which it passed to the Hitachi chip, which pronounced them through a speaker. I'd never even heard of phenomes before this so I had to do a bunch of learning.

Ever since then I've had a casual interest in the technology and about every year I try to get a chance to listen to the progress being made. It's amazing progress and I think the quality of the TTS reading "Sayonara" was excellent, as TTS goes. But it still has to get a lot better to make me interested in listening to books that way.

It handled the Japanese words about as well as the English words, which surprised me. The problem is in it's phrasing, which was better than I expected but still not good enough. If my eyes went today and there were no audiobooks I'd be glad to have this. I'm even more glad not to need it.

All in all I think the most fun part about the Echo is watching it grow. Amazon emails me every week or two with a list of the latest features. They're also listed in the Echo app. They're doing a really good job with this, in my opinion. Not a lot of the new features really interest me that much but it's still fun reading about them.

I have been considering getting a Wifi switch so I can tell Alexa to turn on the lights but I never seem to get around to it. There are too many more useful things to spend my little bit of money on. Still, I may eventually do that and have another way to show the Echo off.

Barry