One of the unique features with Fire tablets is the ability to use text-to-speech to read Kindle ebooks aloud.
Not all Kindle books support TTS but most do. There’s a note on the product details page for each Kindle book that says if it supports text-to-speech or not.
TTS also works on sideloaded books and documents that you send to your Kindle account, and even on MOBI books downloaded with the web browser.
There are a number of voices that you can install, depending on the language.
I like the United Kingdom male voice better than the default voice; it sounds a bit more natural.
You can change the text-to-speech reading speed but it seems to sound best at the default 1x setting.
The TTS features on Fire tablets work a lot better than the screen reading feature on Kindle ereaders. If you want good TTS Fire tablets are the way to go and they’re a lot cheaper than Kindles anyway, and the larger batteries last much longer for audio playback.
However, the speaker volume on both the $49 Fire tablet and $79 Fire HD 8 is very low. Unless you’re listening in a quite room you’re going to need some headphones or speakers.
Here’s a video demo showing how text-to-speech sounds and works on Fire tablets. All the current models have the same TTS features and so do the older ones.
How come the US American male voices sound like robots (like having Stephen Hawking reading to you) and the British voices sound so much natural?
I prefer English, female voice better then most
Me too 👍
I love text to speech. But not in the tablets, the Echo is the best way to go. With Unlimited and Echo who needs Audible.
Can HD8 do voice to text? Thank you very much.
Not normally, but it has a mic so you can probably install an app for it.
If you own an older 6 inch 4th generation Fire, there is a voice tab on the virtual keyboard. If you own a newer Fire model (such as the 7 inch 5th generation), look for the talk type voice keyboard (free in the app store for voice to text writing on the Fire tablet.)
A German one downloaded and I can’t delete it. Help please.
I love TTS on my Fire HD8 but it keeps stopping lately. Sometimes it reads only one page and stops. It’s very annoying. Any solutions? (my tablet is only 6 months old)
Thank you
Turn on airplane mode. Mine stops when looking for signal or I accidentally touch or jostle the screen, ie in the car.
Turn off notifications and wifi. I think speech is interrupted by notifications. Still stops but days could go by.