Kindle For Mac Text To Speech

While the newly updated iteration of the Kindle, Amazon’s e-book reader, has impressed many, there’s at least one group that’s taken issue with the device: the Authors Guild. The association, which is a professional organization for writers, has objected to the fact that the Kindle 2 features text-to-speech functionality that can read books aloud.

The Guild’s executive director, Paul Aiken, told the Wall Street Journal that the capability violated authors’ copyrights, as Amazon doesn’t own the rights for audio recordings. The legality of this issue is up in the air—recording rights, such as those for audiobooks, are often sold separately from the text itself,but that raises the question of whether or not text-to-speech synthesis constitutes an audio recording.

Part of this is the Guild playing the long game: right now the quality of text-to-speech isn’t a replacement for a professional recording read by an actual narrator, but the Guild clearly doesn’t want to be in a position where they’re betting against technological innovation. If it cedes this debate now, it’s going to have a harder time arguing against it in ten years when text-to-speech is a lot better (compare today’s text synthesis engines to those of ten or twenty years ago to see how far we’ve already come).

Kindle For Mac Text To Speech

[Think text-to-speech is already good enough that it’ll replace audiobooks? I’ve uploaded a recording of this article read by me and one read by OS X’s Alex so you can compare for yourself.]

Speechelo is the best How To Increase The Text To Speech Speed In Kindle App Mac in my opinion and and there’s no close second to it. Lets talk more about and text to speech softwares in general. Having great text to speech software can actually be a life saver in many cases. Listen to Kindle Books via Text to Speech. The text-to-speech (TTS) is a cool technology that can convert text to audio, which is a great assistant for you to turn Kindle books to audiobooks when there is no Audible companion for the ebook or when you don't want to pay extra money to buy the audiobook.

But setting the legal issues aside for the moment, it seems to me that while the Authors Guild is playing for the long term, in the short term it’s a hair’s breadth away from shooting itself in the foot. The Kindle is the most influential technological device in the e-book market and it has the potential to do for text what the iPod did for music. Right now both the e-book and audiobook markets are relatively small compared, say, to online music. There’s also probably a decent amount of overlap between the two markets, as they share the same underlying demographic of people that still read—itself an increasingly small minority of the general public.

Publishing companies—and through them, authors—are being hit hard by the economy; they’re also starting to feel the same crunch that the music and movie industries have run into in this increasingly digital world. Adaptation is needed if the industry is going to survive in this day and age.

I’m no businessman, much less a lawyer, but I can see a couple of potential solutions. Amazon already owns the largest audiobook service on the Web in Audible, and it allows you to load and play back audiobooks from the service on the device. It’d be great if users could purchase and download audiobooks directly from the Kindle, but according to the company, the file sizes are too big to be downloaded over the device’s network connection, so they have to be loaded from a PC.

But text-to-speech should still be available as an alternative. Why? Well, for a few reasons: firstly, in the short term, the vast majority of audiobook devotees are unlikely to ditch them for the emotionless text-to-speech of a computer. Secondly, I’d wager that enough people will be frustrated with the lackluster quality of text-to-speech that they’ll shell out for the real deal. Finally, not every book gets turned into an audiobook in the first place, so why not let people listen to a book if it’s something that wasn’t going to be recorded anyway? Better yet, if the rights holders can negotiate a deal with Amazon to figure out which books are being read aloud the most, it can potentially take advantage of that to produce audiobook versions of titles that might otherwise not have merited the treatment.

Kindle for mac text to speech

I understand the need—both financial and psychological—for publishing companies and authors to make money off audio rights, but they need to learn from the lessons of the movie and music industries and realize that they stifle technological innovation at their own peril. Playing the long game is all well and good, but if they ignore adapting in the short term, there may not be much of a long term left.

Amazon Kindle, the most popular e-reader, allows you to store and read e-books wherever you go. In addition, it also offers the wireless access to the Internet and the Kindle Store that you can purchase and download more e-books directly to your device.

From Kindle 2, an amazing Text-To-Speech, generally abbreviated as TTS, feature allows traditional e-books to be read out loud, essentially turning your books into audio books. The TTS function will also allow you to listen to an audio version of magazines, newspaper articles, documents and even blogs. More and more Kindle users realized it's a very useful function of the Kindle.

Regrettably, there are several limitations on the Kindle's TTS feature.

1) Not every book on your Kindle can be read aloud because publishers may disable the feature for their books.

Kindle app for mac text to speechMac

2) The quality of the voices is not very good. We expect humanlike natural-sounding voices, but the Kindle's voices are robotic.

Does Kindle For Mac Have Text To Speech

3) There are only two voices available for selection: a male and a female voice.

4) No voices of other languages except English.

5) It's inconvenient for long-term users of PC.

Kindle For Mac Text To Speech Speed

Fortunately, there is a similar Text-To-Speech technology that avoids all the above limitations on personal computers. All you need to do is just download and install a piece of software, then immediately your PC will be a talking computer that much better than Amazon Kindle!

Text-To-Speech software allows you to seamlessly convert any type of text into natural-sounding speech or even MP3 audio files. You can listen on your PC directly or create audio files for use on portable devices like iPods, Pocket PCs and CD players.

Support Various Text File Formats

Most TTS software can open and play Word Documents, Emails, Web Pages, PDF Files and any other text files directly. Additionally, the Watch Clipboard feature is a universal function that allows you to get and hear the text from any other application.

Better and More Speech Voices

Nowadays, on the Internet, there are a large number of high-quality speech voices available across multiple languages, including American English, British English, Spanish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, etc. Most of these voices are compatible with popular TTS software. And you may also purchase the famous AT&T Natural Voices and experience and best natural-sounding computer synthesized speech.

Kindle for mac text to speech speed

More Customizable and More Controls

In the Amazon Kindle's Read-to-Me feature, you can only increase or decrease the speed of the speech. By comparison, PC's TTS software allows you adjust speed, pitch, volume, accent and even custom pronunciation. Additionally, by inserting the advanced speech control tags, you can enhance the speech synthesis technology to a new level. For example, in the same article, you can play the first paragraph with a male voice and play the second paragraph with a female voice, no clicks, no delay, just like read out smoothly with a same voice.

You may also find more accessory features in Text-To-Speech software, such as the speech reminder, speech alarm and batch converter, etc. All of these features will make your life less stressful, more productive, and more enjoyable!

Kindle For Mac Text To Speech

Thomas Carson is a text to speech technology enthusiast and expert. Text to speech technology enables any PC user to convert any written text like emails, web pages, Word documents, and PDF files into spoken words. With the help of text to speech technology, you can also easily convert any written text into audio files such as MP3 or WAV, so that you can store them into your portable MP3 player and listen to them as you go about your other tasks at home or at work.