Part of this email was posted to the vi-kindle list but I thought it would be
helpful to some on this list also. I am adding more content in posting it to
macvoiceover.
I was unable to find a reliable way to have Kindle for the Mac's text to speech
read an entire book without stopping and having to be resumed. This was the
case even when in continuous reading mode in Kindle. It might do this with a
short book but I wouldn't count on it and certainly not for anything more than
a half hour or so. I also think that the speech to text is not actually built
into the Kindle application on the Mac but that Kindle somehow activates the
built-in text to speech so it would be hard to troubleshoot and change that
behavior. But there is another way to listen to Kindle books on the Mac.
I have found a rather novel way of listening to Kindle books on the Mac
continuously without interruption. I discovered that the "reverb" application,
which is also available on iOS devices (maybe android too but I can't remember)
is available for the Mac. This app allows you to use Amazon Echo to some extent
on the Mac. It is a little tricky with voiceover because you can't really do a
click and hold; even with the trackpad this doesn't seem to work. But I found
that I could do vo-space on the speak button usually twice. The second time I
could hear the sound the echo makes when awakened. Also voiceover should say
"listening" and it is also visible with braille. I say my command (no wake word
needed at this point) and do vo-space on the speak button usually just once.
Voiceover announces "thinking" and then the answer to your command is given. If
using braille you can mute voiceover if you wish and use the routing keys to
activate the speak button. At any rate, I can say "play my kindle book" and
give the name of the book and the book is read aloud for me. As far as I know
you can not speed this up but you should be able to listen to the whole book
without interruption. I listened to one book that was several hours long
without a problem. In one instance I did have a stop in one book and I
suspected it had something to do with using voiceover while in the reverb
window so to be safe I turned off or muted voiceover.
. Reading is done with the normal echo voice and not with voices on the Mac.
For this reason it appears that the speech is controlled from reverb and not
from the Mac's text-to-speech program.
Reverb also works for other requests. I have asked what time it is and
requested weather information. I enabled the sermonaudio skill and asked
sermonaudio to play a sermon from "my church" which I had set up previously on
one of my physical echoes. Now that I know how to get reverb to work I am
getting very fast at issuing commands, pressing the speak button again to have
the echo think and receiving my answer.
Hth.
--
Cheryl
May the words of my mouth
and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable to You, Lord,
my rock and my Redeemer.
(Psalm 19:14 HCSB)
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