[Desertway]

Originally Posted by tomsem

They are the same text to speech voices as my Fire HD 10, as far as I can tell (they sound exactly the same).

For reference, Kindle app is currently version 14.84.100 on both (but TTS is a system service, not part of the Kindle app).

Thanks very much for looking into it for me. It's very much appreciated. It looks like it's the same version as on my Fire HD 8.

There are evidently hacks that let you replace the default TTS engine, but for me the default engine (Ivona) is good enough, even though it does not seem to be getting updates.

I'll definitely check that hack out, but odds are that it's well beyond me.

Note that you can use Alexa (on Fire or Echo etc) to read books, and it evidently uses Amazon Polly (an AWS service which is the successor to Ivona):

https://aws.amazon.com/polly/

It does sound more natural, and of course will improve over time. You can open the book with Kindle app (or Kindle) and follow along in the text. I need to figure out how to change default voice, the Alexa app is not showing me how to do it for some reason (I tap on the card and it opens an empty screen).

I do listen by way of Alexa sometimes, and it's probably the most natural voice I've heard. It's just that it gets old...the same voice for everything, and one many of us have heard for years. As far as I can tell, you can change the voice for all other interactions, but when you ask Alexa to read, it always goes to that default voice.

It would be nice if they would update the on-device voice data somehow, or let you have the Kindle app use the Amazon Polly voices directly (when on line).

I'd be happy if they would even update their flagship device with the standard Polly voices, not even the latest and greatest Polly Neural.

Interestingly Pocketbook licenses Ivona voices for their eReaders. They support a few languages that neither Fire or Amazon Polly support (or at least Czech).

I thought about getting a Pocketbook because of the nicely integrated TTS, but didn't want to give up the convenience of the Kindle ecosystem and whispersync.

Thanks again for all your feedback.