When the first Kindle Oasis leaks and the FCC paperwork which showed that the $290 Oasis had Bluetooth, many hoped that was a sign that it would support audio through a BT speaker.
Now Amazon has just raised that from a hope to a strong probability. SelfPublisherBibel.de reports this morning that they found a folder on their Kindle Oasis which was named “Voice”. Inside that folder they found a text-to-speech voice called “Salli”.
For those who don’t have a Fire tablet at hand, Salli is the default TTS voice for Amazon’s tablets in the US market. It’s the one that Amazon updated about a month back, and its presence on the Oasis is a strong indicator that it will support audio in the near future.
Coincidentally, the Oasis already has its first firmware update (see Amazon’s website for more details).
And in related news, the Kindle Oasis owner’s thread over on MobileRead has confirmed that Ember is a font option. It replaced the Open Dyslexic font. Also, contrary to earlier reports there is no USB port on the case.
If the TTS option does come to pass then the Oasis will be the first new Kindle with text-to-speech since the Kindle Touch,which was released in 2011. Some have been agitating ever since then for Amazon to add TTS to the Kindle, and now they could be getting their wish.
Speaking of which, how do you suppose Amazon will support audio on the Oasis?
Unlike the first four generations of Kindles it has no speaker or headphone jack, so Amazon is either going to have to enable Bluetooth, or release a case with an integrated speaker.
The latter option is less likely given the cost of the case, but it is not impossible.
Actually, according to a poster on MR, when the Oasis was updated to the 3.7.4 firmware, the Futura font reappeared.
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3306942&postcount=21
Thanks. I hadn’t caught that.
OpenDyslexic is back in this firmware release as well.
Thanks.
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So, no USB port means I can resume my paranoia about no sideloading?
I don’t see how; the Oasis has a USB port. It’s the cover which lacks one.
There is definitely still sideloading: I sideloaded a bunch of stuff today. 🙂
[…] Nate brought up a couple of other new rumors, including a post on a German blog that, as nearly as I can make out with the help of Google […]
If it gets TTS I’ll order one. I’m just waiting to see if Amazon implements it.
It may have the voice files, but it is not turned on yet.
If TTS is turned on the future, this page will likely be updated in the “Text-to-Speech” section:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201286790
That’s very interesting. Am assuming you’d need a bluetooth device if there’s no obvious speaker?
Yes. One was used in the FCC testing.
Love the txt to speech if it does. But I understood that along with a Amazon Echo it would read the books in the oasis ?
When at home on the same wifi network.
Preordered can not wait to try it!
Echo/Tap/Dot will read out any books in your Kindle Library (if in English, and TTS is enabled for that title). No Oasis required, but of course you can follow along in the text as it does this.
What’s not clear about this is why they would choose to pre-load the voice data. Could all be handled at feature update time, and depending on region, a given user might want something other than Salli. In the mean time, it’s taking up space users might want for something else. How big is it? (guessing 150-250MB or so since there’s about that much less free space on Oasis as compared with Voyage).
Free publicity?
They like torturing bloggers?
An oversight?
Yeah, it’s about 150MiB. I guess they didn’t want to bloat every firmware download by that much, and this way if you don’t use TtS, even when it’s supported, it seems likely that you can move it off the Kindle and reclaim the space.