Audible recently revealed a new feature they’re working on called Audible Captions that basically adds computer-generated captions to audiobooks so that you can read along while listening to the audiobook, similar to Amazon’s Immersion Reading feature.
The Audible Captions feature is expected to come to the Audible app for Android and iOS this September in time for back-to-school season because it’s being touted as a new learning feature to help students, and according to an article on USA Today, Audible is offering public schools access to select Caption-ready content for free.
Apparently users will be able to adjust font type and size, and you’ll even be able to select words for dictionary definitions and referencing Wikipedia, and also translating.
It could be a great help when learning a new language or even just trying to improve comprehension and retention.
This reminds me a lot of the song lyrics feature that’s available with certain songs when using Amazon Music where you can choose to read along with the song’s lyrics as they’re sung. You can pause the music and scroll through the lyrics, and if you click on a section it will fast-forward the song to that location.
There’s already a lot of controversy brewing over the rights to show text on an audiobook, similar to the old controversy when Amazon first added text-to-speech to Kindles.
Audible Captions is basically the reverse of text-to-speech so it’s not surprising to see the same arguments crop up again. It’ll probably play out the same way as TTS, where some publishers will refuse to allow it with their audiobooks.
Here’s a video showing how the Audible Captions feature will work. Does anyone really think this is going to replace ebooks?
Introducing Audible Captions
via: The Verge
I like to read along with audiobooks, but I’ll stick with actual text copies. Computer generated audio captions can be really off.
Thank you nathan
After reading this post of yours, I watched the video and after a lot of searching, I found this article (https://www.readerscare.com/read-and-listen-to-audible-audiobooks-at-a-time/) where everything is given step by step guide to how to listen audible audiobooks on audible app. I can follow everything and listen and read captions together. But my problem is elsewhere and that is that as soon as I listen to the audio I don’t find any match of the caption, the audio goes first and the caption comes later. Do you have a solution?