Amazon has quietly started rolling out a new revamped text-to-speech feature on Kindles called Assistive Reader. It’s been available on Kindle apps for some time, but now Kindle ereaders are getting the ability to read ebooks aloud via a software update too.
Kindles used to support text-to-speech back in the early years, but then Amazon removed TTS from Kindles starting with the first gen Kindle Paperwhite.
They ended up replacing it with something called VoiceView that’s similar to TTS, but it requires navigating the Kindle using various gestures as it reads the entire screen contents aloud, including menu items. It’s labeled as an Accessibility feature and it was designed for people with vision problems.
This new Assistive Reader feature is a lot easier to use because it’s more like traditional text-to-speech. The voice isn’t as good as some TTS voices, but it gets the job done.
How to Turn On Text-to-Speech
You can turn the new Assistive Reader on from the Aa settings menu while reading; it’s under the More tab. Once on, it will stay on until you turn it off. Then you can activate it by hitting the play button that’s located on the lower right corner of the on-screen menu.
The Assistive Reader voice automatically turns off when opening the menu and when doing things like adding highlights. With some things you have to hit the play button again, but when adding highlights or turning pages the voice will start up on its own without having to hit the play button again.
When you turn pages, the voice will automatically start reading from the top of the page while it’s active.
Read and Listen
One cool thing about the new Assistive Reader feature is the fact that it underlines the words as it reads. This is the first time that Kindle ereaders have supported anything like that.
Amazon has their Immersion Reading feature on Kindle apps that highlights words as the audiobook reads aloud, but Kindles have never supported that, and they still don’t. But this is similar. And you don’t have to own the audiobook for it to work.
Interestingly, VoiceView has never underlined the words as it reads aloud, and it still doesn’t after this update.
Assistive Reader Supported Books
Amazon says the Assistive Reader only works with books that have Enhanced Typesetting enabled.
It does not work with sideloaded books. Even books that are sent through Send-to-Kindle don’t support using the Assistive Reader (it’s greyed out in the menu, and it says text-to-speech is not available for this book.
The Assistive Reader currently supports the following languages: English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian.
Kindle Models That Support Assistive Reader
According to the Assistive Reader help page on Amazon’s website, the new TTS feature is available on 11th gen Kindles and newer, including the Kindle Scribe and the Kindle Colorsoft. That covers all Kindles released since 2021.
Video Demo of Assistive Reader on Kindles
On a side note, it’s shocking how bad the sound quality is when using the iPad Air’s built-in microphone. That has to be taken into account with this video. It was easier just to record everything in one take, but now I remember why I started doing voiceovers using a real microphone in these videos.
I don’t think this option works with books checked out from the library via Overdrive/Libby, either. I have it set as on, but the book is not being read out loud. Maybe a Bluetooth speaker or headphones/earbuds need to also configured?