Amazon issued a press release today with their financial results for the fourth quarter of 2017, and in it they mention how Alexa, Amazon’s voice-activated virtual assistant, has taken off faster than expected.
Here’s a quote from the article:
“Our 2017 projections for Alexa were very optimistic, and we far exceeded them. We don’t see positive surprises of this magnitude very often — expect us to double down,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO.
With Alexa becoming more popular, is seems very possible that the next new Kindle could feature built-in Alexa support.
Amazon’s Fire tablets already have Alexa onboard, and the Fire HD 10 has hands-free Alexa, which makes it a lot more convenient to use.
But how would Alexa work with a Kindle?
If they tailored it to reading-specific features it could be quite useful.
For one, being able to do voice searches would be faster than using the onscreen keyboard. You could easily jump to a book in the Kindle store or in your library, or search the text of an ebook with voice commands.
Another obvious feature would be to have Alexa read ebooks aloud to bring text-to-speech back to Kindles (currently they have VoiceView but not regular TTS).
Alexa could also be used for things like asking to lookup a specific word in the dictionary or online, you could ask to skip chapters or jump to different parts of a book, add bookmarks, or turn pages for hands-free reading.
So what do you think. Should the next new Kindle add Alexa support? Or is it just something that’s not needed on a reading device?
I wouldn’t pay extra for any of those features, but the ability to dictate voice notes would be fantastic, especially with option to convert to text…
Kindle Fire tablets have TTS, but not the ereaders. You have to hunt a little to find the enabling setting, but it is there.
Widespread TTS would impact Audible sales. Don’t hold your breath.
I would be actively DIS-interested in any Kindle that added that “feature.” Hard pass.
COULD it be useful? Maybe. First, though, they should develop a device (and firmware) equal to the Kobo Aura One.
I want a bigger device from Amazon. I want to change the frontlight color. I want to add my own fonts. I want to eliminate margins. I want to add 3rd-party apps like KoReader. Most of all, I want to automate the organizing of my sideloaded library.
The Aura One has all of those things. Most of those things, Kindle *once* had but (deliberately) removed. Amazon gives me those things then MAYBE Alexa would be a deal-maker.
Not until.
I only care about Alexa if it means bringing back TTS. As Amazon owns Audible though, I suspect even if they did add Alexa, TTS isn’t part of the plan. They want to sell audiobooks after all. Add Amazon’s petty ongoing blocks on Google products and services… yeah, no sale.
I would think that adding Alexa to e-readers would significantly affect battery life? Isn’t anyone else thinking the same thing?
Battery life or Alexa on an e-reader? I’ll take battery life.
I have owned my kindle since 2014, I currently own a 5th gen it has been updated and now alexa is a app. She thinks she is a echo dot if you ask her.but I want to point something out to current owners or people who are interested in buying a ‘new’ amazon kindle just for Alexa. The app basicly is now on all up to date kindles, TTS has been removed from all books. audible is forced if you want to listen to your books, about a month ago you could have a TTS voice read your books for free. But now you have to pay a minimum of £2.99 per audio plus the subscription to audible which is not cheap.
Good luck to anyone whom reads this and I hope I stop at least one person wasting a lot of money. Myself I am looking at purchasing another Ereader so I don’t have to pay £80 subscription for audio books.
It would be great for people that do not have use of their hands. There is no way to change the page in a book audibly. That would be amazing and open the kindle to a while new market, the disabled.
This would be ace as I only have one arm/hand that works. When I have spasms then reading becomes difficult. So being able to say “Alexa, turn over” or “Alexa, next page” would make my life a lot easier.