what if you could make your phone or tablet read kindle or other text aloud? I have recently found an easy way to do this. This is an economics blog, so I will point out that this approach saves a considerable amount of money compared to paying for audiobooks like Audible or paying for the narration option on Kindle. most of us already have textbooks that we have bought, e.g. light. Also, if you search on the subject, there are several sources of free books online, including hundreds of thousands of titles available through libby/overdrive through your public library. this text-to-speech method should work with all of these e-books.
iphone/ipad instructions: a short youtube video “how to make your iphone read kindle books aloud” by kyle oliver tells you everything you need to know. the key step is to go to settings, then accessibility, then spoken content. on that screen, turn on talk screen. With voice display on, whenever you’re on a page with text (including a Kindle or other eBook), swipe down from the top of the screen with two fingers. which will trigger the reading of that page of text. in addition, a small voice control panel will appear. that panel will let you play/pause/skip forward and backward. will also allow you to toggle between multiple speeds: 1x, 1.5x, 2x, & 1/2x.
You are reading: Read kindle books aloud
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if you want, while in the spoken content screen, you can also activate the voice selection. that will give you a voice option to read aloud whatever text you have selected and then stop.
Also, on the spoken content screen there is a voices link, to select which voice you want to hear. you can experiment with various voices. I found that the male siri voice (“siri voice 1”) is preferable. the female Siri is too sweet to listen to for long, and most of the other voices are robotic. I find that if I select a new voice, I have to turn reading off and then back on for the new voice to start working. one more tip from that youtube is to dim the screen as with continuous reading of kindle pages the screen will stay on and it will drain the battery quickly if the screen is bright.
once you swipe down with two fingers to start reading, you should also continue reading on the following pages. for unknown reasons it doesn’t work sometimes. I find that using the skip forward then back buttons on the small voice control panel takes off this functionality.
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for android: youtube kindle android text to speech by ad vice has similar instructions for android. in this case, you end up opening the voice feature by triple-clicking the home button.
There is a more difficult way to do all of the above, which is to download a standalone text-to-speech app, such as speechify or voice dream reader. These apps will read most of the text that is on your screen, but not Kindle or other eBooks that have Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection. For these eBooks, you would need to download another app like Epupor Ultimate on your computer, download your Kindle files to your computer, and then run Epupor on these files to create unprotected versions. then i guess upload these files back to your phone/tablet where the text to speech app can access them to read them out loud. this doesn’t seem worth it (compared to the simple method above which uses the built-in iphone/android capabilities) unless you want to use some additional function of the external text-to-speech app.
note: under the low-cost text-to-speech theme, there are apps like librivox or (using your local library) overdrive or libby that offer free audiobooks; check out this lifewire article. if a book is already available as an audiobook, it’s probably better to use that format to listen to it, rather than downloading it as text and then using the approach here to listen to it.
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