Text-to-Speech on the iPhone?
By Joe Wikert
It was more than a year ago that I encouraged Amazon to consider adding an eye-resting feature where the Kindle reads to you. I doubt my post had anything to do with it, but I was pleased to see they’ve implemented this on Kindle 2, calling it "Text-to-Speech."
The big question now is whether Amazon will offer the same functionality to all its Kindle 1 owners, via either a firmware or software update. Since the hardware capabilities exist for this in Kindle 1, there’s no reason the company shouldn’t offer it; not doing so would be a sharp poke in the eye to all the early adopters who bought Kindle 1, IMHO.
A killer iPhone app—and perhaps even a future Stanza feature?
As I’ve also mentioned before, I have no plans to upgrade to Kindle 2 since I’m leaning more and more towards the iPhone platform for my reading needs. That got me thinking. When will we see a text-to-speech feature on the iPhone?
Many have complained that the iPhone’s screen is too small and its backlit display makes long form reading less than comfortable. Fair enough. I tend to read shorter-length pieces on mine anyway—for example, the New York Times, and USA Today—but text-to-speech would be a killer iPhone feature. And it would undoubtedly lead to even more long-form "reading" on the device.
Lexcycle makes the extremely popular Stanza reader for the iPhone. I’ll bet it wouldn’t be hard for the company to add this feature to a future version.
Related: TTS and audio rights, by Mike Shatzkin. Also check out an audio of the Kindle 2’s text-to-speech feature in action. At least for now, the robot-like speech is no competition for audio books with human narrators.
February 26th, 2009 at 3:11 am
Again the non-book reading function jumps out. On-location audio museum tours? City walking tours?
September 19th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Hi, did you ever get any news of text to speech on iphone? please let me know because I am looking for that. Thanks.