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By Joe Wikert

Iphone3gIt 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.

 
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