Today Amazon announced plans to add new Alexa voice features to the Fire TV, including the ability to launch apps, control video playback, search local businesses and restaurants, and more.
At the bottom of the new features list is an interesting Kindle-related addition, especially considering the fact that Amazon just released a new Kindle Audio Adapter last week to bring text-to-speech to the Kindle Paperwhite 3, Kindle Voyage, and Kindle Oasis.
The new feature allows users to access Kindle books on a Fire TV using Alexa to listen to text-to-speech for ebooks that have it enabled.
All you have to do is tell Alexa to “Read (insert title of book)” to active TTS, and it will pick up where you last left off.
Here’s the page with the list of voice commands for reading Kindle books with Alexa.
In many cases it seems like it would make more sense for blind and visually impaired people to use Alexa’a voice command features with an Echo or Fire TV to use text-to-speech for Kindle books instead of dealing with a dongle and a Kindle, which only lasts about 6 hours for audio playback anyway—good for on the go but not so good at home.
via: Press Release
Hi there,
Thanks for keeping me current with all these latest Amazon roll outs.
I do agree that using Echo seems more convenient. But I suppose that Amazon gives people one more reason to go with Fire TV. Amazon gets the value of cross-platforming.
Cheers,
Anne