Quote:
Originally Posted by jswinden
I think one of the reasons the Kindles lost speakers, and therefore the TTS feature, was that TTS was not good at all, thus many people were not that sad to see this feature go away. With Audible you get a real person who can inflect the proper tones, emotions, pauses, et cetera into the text being read, not to mention actually use proper pronunciation. With TTS you get a lot of garbage. No doubt TTS has improved and will continue to do so, but it will never come close to a real person, especially a trained voice actor, reading the book to you.
BTW, at Xmas I went over to a friend's house and they had Echo. I was not impressed. It had great difficulty interpreting what anyone said, even the owner of the device. My friend had to continually go right above it and nearly yell commands into it and even then Alexa acted like a dumb blonde quite often. His wife laughed, pulled out her iPhone and demonstrated that Siri worked a lot better than Echo/Alexa. No way I would pay $200 USD for that junk. Having purchased the useless FireTV stick last year when it was introduced, I'm not at all surprised at how bad Echo is.
|
Have you used text-to-speech in awhile? It was horrid on the Kindle Keyboard, but it comes close to natural now, especially with Ivona voices. Any tablet with at least a decent dual core CPU and 1 gig ram should do a good job. I use Google Books text-to-speech with Ivona installed with UK Amy voice and I think it does a good job. When I had my Kindle tablets, the 6 and a 7 HD both did well with text-to-speech, but if you haven't tried it in awhile you will notice a big difference. I like audiobooks, but the advantage with text-to-speech is the reading voice doesn't interpret anything, you don't get their idea of what a character's voice sounds like, or how tense a scene should be, or not. And text-to-speech reads faster, allowing me to finish books quicker. Not saying it is better, but it has advantages along with disadvantages compared to regular audiobooks.
Edit: BTW I use either headphones or bluetooth speakers, and that makes a huge difference. On board speakers are often horrible on tablets.