New Fire Max 11

[tomsem]

It is easy to change the Alexa speaking voice: "(Alexa,) change your voice".

But this does not affect the voice used for TTS, even after all these years. Why can't they add manual controls to the Alexa player to adjust speed, change the voice, etc.?

That said, I've installed Alexa app on my iPhone and that will let me AirPlay to HomePod, use one of my several headsets, control playback with Watch etc.

Arguably it is a superior alternative to using accessibility (VoiceView on Kindle, Speak Screen on iOS), provided you are willing to follow along in the text manually.

Unfortunately if you pause playback it terminates the Alexa reading session after a relatively short timeout (a minute or less), and you have to go back and re-start it.

[Desertway]

Yes, it's frustrating to not be able to change reader voices when we know other voices exist.

Maybe you have tried already tried this, but it SEEMS to me that when you change the Assistive Reader speed using voice command on the dot ("Alexa, read at 95%"), the same speed is used in the app. I may be wrong because I've only changed the speed in small increments. In any case it's not convenient for changing on the fly.

[tomsem]

It seems Alexa reading skill has not really improved much since it shipped ten years ago with the first Echo. For example it makes errors with words whose pronunciation changes with context, ironically including the word read (pronounces it reed when it is past tense). Surely TTS has advanced beyond this?

And I couldn't get Alexa to AirPlay to HomePod when I tried it last night. After the attempt it couldn't do any reading task, even after force quit. Today it is back to normal, but it is very buggy. The Lock Screen media control shows the wrong title for example.

[Quoth]

And the Kindle K3 and DXG and even the PW3 via USB Audio dongle aren't much better than 1991.

[tomsem]

Last night I was able to switch Alexa playback to AirPlay as expected. I think the problem was with voice recognition the night before: it can't 'listen' if connected to AirPlay device, and that's what I was trying to do. Picking it from recent items in the app works okay.

Ideally it would be able to use HomePod (or a Mac) microphone for voice input when AirPlay is connected. But I don't know if that's possible.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Quoth

And the Kindle K3 and DXG and even the PW3 via USB Audio dongle aren't much better than 1991.

The PW3 TTS is much better than the earlier TTS (which includes Kindle Touch): it uses Ivona, which Amazon acquired a little while before that (and had to add RAM to accommodate its voice data). I think it has been the same Ivona TTS engine ever since then, though only via BlueTooth in 8th and later generation Kindles.

I think any improvement to on device or Alexa TTS for Kindle books comes out of their bottom line to some extent. They don't make much money on Kindle or Fire or Echo devices, so not much incentive to improve.

Amazon Poppy service contributes to AWS profits and they have competition in this space (Microsoft, Google, Apple). So they will continue to improve that.

[Catlady]

I just received my new Fire Max 11 and started setting it up. I'm a little daunted by having to re-download so many apps that were on my 10-inch Fire tablet--I thought everything I'd gotten from the Amazon Appstore would magically appear, and I'd just have to add my sideloaded apps!

While my brain knew a 1-inch larger screen wasn't really going to make much difference, I still was surprised how little difference there is. But my 10-inch was five years old, so I'm glad I upgraded while it still had a good trade-in value.

ETA: Well, my bad. I had no idea that my apps were indeed being downloaded from the cloud in the background, as there was no download icon on the screen.