Quote:
Originally Posted by Crash500
You might be right about trying it out for myself. I did watch the videos on amazon but it's really hard to tell from it. I think I would be ok with it but it just doesn't play long enough to be sure.
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I would expect that the short clip Amazon put in its self-advertisement is probably the read-to-me feature at its best. I wouldn't expect it to be anything like an audiobook. Audiobook readers put a degree of performance into their readings that text-to-speech algorithms aren't going to match. I've tried to use my laptop to do this in the past, and it wasn't acceptable at all.
What kind of computer do you have? I'm pretty sure current versions of both macs and windows each have text-to-speech feature. Maybe someone else can chime in with how to do it on windows.
If you're on a mac, highlight some text (try this post!) and then click the name of your browser in the menubar (probably either Firefox or Safari, in bold), choose "Services", and then "Speech" and then, "Start Speaking text".
There may be ways to customize the voice a bit, on the Mac, it's under "System Preferences" -> "Speech" -> "Text to Speech".
You can try using that with some lengthier passages. It's possible that Amazon has really innovated in this area, but my guess is that it's similar to what's offered on desktop/laptop computers, which I think you'll find are not easy to listen to for anything longer than a sentence or two.
FWIW, on a Mac, I felt like the "Alex" voice was by far the best, but it's still nothing I'd want to listen to for very long.