Kindle's Text to Speech Feature

Function

• The Kindle allows you to listen to your books and other documents through the device's external speakers or through earphones when you plug them into the headphone jack on the device, which is located below the power switch. The feature offers a male and a female voice to choose from and you can select the speed at which your text is read as well. Your Kindle will automatically turn the pages on your device when you use the text-to-speech feature so you can follow along visually.

Instructions

• Press the "Menu" button with your e-book open to the page you want text-to-speech to begin reading. Press the down arrow until "Text-to-Speech" is underlined and press the 5-way button to start the feature. Pressing the text key, which looks like a squiggly line, will bring up the speech rate and speaking voice controls for the "Text-to-Speech" feature. Pressing the spacebar will pause text-to-speech and resume the feature once it's paused.

Controversy

• You cannot use text-to-speech with every e-book on your Kindle. Some publishers and authors do not allow the feature for their books, claiming it takes away part of the market for audio versions of their books. Amazon maintained that the feature was legal because text-to-speech does not create an audio copy of the book, but allowed publishers and authors to select whether they wish to enable the feature for Kindle users for particular titles.

Considerations

• Using text-to-speech will not stop other audio from playing, so you may want to turn off other audio you have playing, such as MP3 files, before enabling the text-to-speech feature. Text-to-speech may not pronounce every word correctly, particularly names and places. While most books and documents read aloud will flow smoothly, the flow and pronunciation won't be as smooth as an audiobook recorded by an actual human being.