Over the past couple months I’ve seen a number of reports of people saying the Kindle apps for Android and iOS now support text-to-speech through a new “Assistive Reader” feature that Amazon has quietly added without saying anything about it.
In fact, someone left a comment here two months ago about the new Assistive Reader feature so I’ve been wiating for it to show up on my devices, but it still isn’t available on my Android phone or iPad, even though the Kindle app has been updated to the latest version on both, so apparently it’s device dependant and some older models aren’t getting this new feature for some reason.
You can check if your device has the Assistive Reader function by tapping the Aa button on the top menu within a book and then selecting More.
You also have the option to turn real-time text highlighting on and off so you can listen to text-to-speech while reading along with highlighted text if you want to, like the Immersive Reading feature that’s available when you own both the ebook and the Audible audiobook.
Keep in mind, not all Kindle ebooks support text-to-speech so it might not be available with certain titles. You can check the product page at Amazon for each book and in the details section it says if TTS in enabled or not.
It’s weird how Amazon doesn’t mention the new feature anywhere. The app update history doesn’t say anything about it on Android or iOS, but maybe it’s because the feature isn’t available on all devices. Amazon has a tendency to leave out these kinds of details in release notes with Kindles and Kindles apps so you never really know what new features you’re going to find after an update.
If you’ve tried the new Assistive Reader feature let us know what you think in the comments section below.
Interesting! I did not know about this. I checked on my iPhone SE (2nd Gen) and iPad (8th Gen) and both devices have this. I’m not sure if it’s something I’d use, but it’s good to see that it is available in the apps.
This is something I definitely want in my android kindle apps. But don’t have yet.