[tomsem]

VoiceView is technically a screen reader, designed for people with vision issues, and for them it works very well (I would encourage everyone to turn it on, complete the Tutorial, close your eyes and try to operate the Kindle. It just takes a little practice and will give you some notion of what the experience is like.). The pause between pages is an audio cue to let them know the page is turning. And there are specialized gestures and audio feedback to make it easier for them to navigate the user interface. VoiceView currently only supports English on the Kindle.

Older Kindles (Kindle Touch and earlier) did have Text-to-Speech, again only for English. But these devices were not accessible to people with vision issues.

Amazon was subject to a lawsuit, and Amazon agreed to include screen readers in their future devices, which they have (even FireTV has a screen reader built in). Thus far, however, they have not restored TTS to the Kindle lineup.

Text-to-speech, by contrast, is for people who want the text read out but who otherwise can operate the device normally. If you want this feature, get a Fire tablet. Its TTS engine comes with dozens of voices for a number of languages (not including Chinese). VoiceView is a feature on it as well, and I think it supports a few non-English languages as well.

The Fire also supports Immersion Reading (also available in the Kindle apps for iOS and Android), which offers synchronized text with audio, highlighting the text being read and turning the pages. On Kindle they are synchronized, but you can cannot listen and see the text being read at the same time.