Seattle – Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has announced the last update for its Amazon Echo feature. Besides assisting users in Amazon’s huge stock of merchandises, Amazon Echo can now provide a robotic voice called Alexa to read your Kindle e-books for you.
Since Amazon introduced the Echo smart speaker last year, many updates have been introduced. Alexa can give users a hand by unlocking and even starting some Ford vehicles, controlling some home appliances, and it can even play Jeopardy. But now, the digital assistant and voice of the Echo has also become a reading assistant.
Kindle e-books by Alexa permits the robotic sound to read anything you have at your Kindle e-book program library. From the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, Kindle Unlimited, through Family Library, Alexa will be able to read the content to you by using the equal text-to-speech technology, which is also used for Wikipedia content. Buyers can also use the feature to browse their collection or available books from other services and see which of them can be read by Alexa.
Along the advantages Kindle e-books by Alexa brings to users, there is the voice recognition feature, which means you don’t even have to use your finger when you want to relax with a book, but don’t feel like reading. Simply you just have to say “Alexa, read [Kindle book title],” and the voice assistant will start narrating it. You can also ask Alexa to pause, resume from where you stopped and skip chapters.
There are some limitations, though. It is necessary to highlight that Alexa is indeed a robotic voice so don’t expect to experience the drama and excitement a professional voice actor would bring to the picture, but if you don’t care about the voice assistant’s robotic sounds, then this service is right for you.
Users can ask Alexa to skip chapters, but for now, it is not possible to tell it which chapter in specific you want to skip to. Even though there are a few restrictions with the app, it is now available at no charge, contrary to Amazon’s service of process Audible, which allows audiobooks for a monthly fee.
Amazon is offering a free Star Wars e-book sampler with excerpts from six novels from the new Star Wars book series to get readers without any e-books started.
Source: Amazon