Text-to-Speech languages on K Touch

[diba]

Seems on 5.1 it does not work any more ... at least my German Books can not be read any more. I continue to check.

[diba]

Even with the unmodified TTS, my Kindle refuses to read aloud. Error Message on english books, grayed out in german ones. And the german ones worked on 5.0.4, no DRM "problem".

[diba]

English working again after a complet reinstall of the languages, but no German any more.
BTW, I think, Amazon has taken "our" OFF Button for the international version.

Could anyone of our specialists, Geekmaster or ixtab, check, if 5.1 has something implemented to block german TTS? As soon as the important things are sorted out of course.

diba

[thomass]

Originally Posted by diba

Even with the unmodified TTS, my Kindle refuses to read aloud. Error Message on english books, grayed out in german ones. And the german ones worked on 5.0.4, no DRM "problem".

Try after setting language of the book( for example on calibre ) so in this forum said that this solved the problem

[ixtab]

The TTS checks that the language is english, and that the book allows for TTS. I have already found the place in the code. If you're curious, it's this snippet of code inside com.amazon.ebook.booklet.reader.plugin.tts.TTSProv ider$TTSAction:

        public TTSAction()
        {
            super();
            q a;
            boolean a = (a = TTSProvider.b(TTSProvider.this).oA().F()).K() && a.y() != 4 && TTSProvider.D(TTSProvider.this, a);
            setEnabled(a);
        }

yes, this is what the code looks like now - damn obfuscation.

So edit the book metadata - throw out the disable TTS flag (if set), and change language to english. The drawback is that this will probably also cause confusion with dictionaries.

I'm currently looking into various approaches to patch this.

[diba]

THX thomass, my books are correct labeled. And this worked from the beginning. I opened this post and my books are tts'd on my K3's without problems.

What I could do, is labeling them to "english", is this what you mean?
This would block the TTS on my K3's ... There should be another solution.

But again thanks, I give this a try with one of my books.

[diba]

And THX to ixtab, knew you are following postings these days closely.

My KT is on 5.1 now as well, thx for the hints from here again.

So am I right, they changed more to block the tts on german books? We know it worked before, and my Calibre is ugraded with ALF. So DRM should not be an issue.

UPDATE:
Setting the language to english in Calibre solves the problem, but as expected, dictionaries do search in english only.

[ixtab]

... they changed the TTS logic to take into account the book language. Because only english TTS is officially available, the reader checks for this and greys out the option for other languages. Makes sense actually (well, except if you *do* have an alternative TTS voice installed )

[diba]

I am sure you find either a way to switch this off or a workaround without changig the language of the book ;-)

[thomass]

Originally Posted by diba

What I could do, is labeling them to "english", is this what you mean?
This would block the TTS on my K3's ... There should be another solution.

What I was referring to is this one:

Originally Posted by linkin360

Something similar happened to me, i have several scanned->OCR->EPUB->MOBI(through calibre) books/documents and TTS, wich was workinf pre-update, was disabled for (only) those. I think i figured out why, the metadata of the books was missing the language, after setting language to english (through calibre) TTS was enabled again.

EDIT: Sorry, missed this part:

Originally Posted by diba

UPDATE:
Setting the language to english in Calibre solves the problem, but as expected, dictionaries do search in english only.

[diba]

Thats what I meant as well. But as ixtab figured out, the reason is another one. I really do not want to label all my books to english for a feature I use once a year to demonstrate to others what the KT can do ...

[Antoinekamel]

Could someone PM me a link to the original TTS files of Kindle Touch?

It was working well until the update to software 5.1, and then it gives an error message when I tap to read to me. The support told me to delete the tts folder and install something almost 300 MB from a link, and it did not resolve, and I'm, therefore, unhoped.

So, can someone send me the original text-to-speech files of Touch?

[diba]

If you got it from support, it should work. Original folder is something around 250 MB. Delete the old one, copy the new to the kindle, restart!! This way it worked for me.

ixtab has somewhere a link to TTS modules, look for them alternativly.

[Antoinekamel]

Thanks for answering, Diba, but what Amazon support sent me was a .bin to "correct the tts". It installed successfully, but did not functioned nor restored the tts folder I was asked to erase.

What I has was already the Tom and Samantha from ixtab's ge.tt site, and it worked well until 5.0:4. With 5.1, I tried deleting, downloading and installing that tts again (even after the allegedly tts update), but the tts error keeps showing.

That's why I'm depositting my expectations in an "originally original" tts folder from someone.

[ixtab]

I'll send you a PM with a link to the TTS files in a moment.