Kindle How-To: Using Text-to-Speech in Kindle DX

Your Kindle can read aloud your books (where allowed by the rights holder), newspapers, magazines, blogs, and personal documents with the Kindle Experimental application, Text-to-Speech.

To turn on Text-to-Speech, follow these steps:

1. Press the Text key .
   

   

2. Move the 5-way down so that the “Text-to-Speech” option is underlined. Press the 5-way to select “turn on.” In a few moments, you will hear your content spoken aloud. You can either listen to it through the Kindle’s external speakers or plug in earphones into the headphone jack.
3. By default, content is spoken with a male voice, but using the 5-way, you can select a female speaking voice. You can also slow down or increase the rate of speech as well as pause or turn off Text-to-Speech.
4. While Text-to-Speech is playing, the screen will update to the corresponding page of text.

For PDF files and books which the rights holder does not allow Text-to-Speech to read aloud their content, then “Text-to-Speech” will be grayed and you will not be able to select it.

By default, Text-to-Speech starts reading at the beginning of the page currently displayed. To start reading at a particular spot, move the cursor where you’d like the reading to begin before starting Text-to-Speech.

Tip: You can also play or stop Text-to-Speech by holding down the Shift key and pressing the Symbol key . You can pause and resume Text-to-Speech by pressing the Spacebar.

Deliver notes to Kindle from EBeam Whiteboards

Luidia, a company that designs and sells interactive electronic whiteboard solutions, is leveraging the display, portability and connectivity of Amazon’s Kindle to offer a new “Send to Kindle” feature that shoots whiteboard contents to an Amazon’s e-book reader.

The new “Send to Kindle” feature is part of Luidia’s eBeam software, which already allows for sending whiteboard information as a BMP, PDF or JPG file to a computer. This allows for review of important data when not at a computer, so there’s no long boot delay introduced — you simply flip your Kindle power on, enable the wireless radio and get to viewing what was on the whiteboard. The new “Send to Kindle” functionality supports both the Kindle 2 and the larger Kindle DX, which is targeted squarely at the education market. While this particular application is fairly specific, it shows the potential of devices as they become web connected.