Text to Speech in iBooks or Amazon Kindle?

[wiggy1]

Ok, so I know that iBooks use to have text to speech but read that the functionality was disabled for whatever reason (at least that is how I understood the article). I am wondering if it is reenabled? I also have the Amazon Kindle app on my iPad and I have a few books that are suppose to be text to speech enabled. However, I can't find a way to get either of these programs to talk to me. Does anyone know, without Jailbreaking? Only reason I say that is I haven't researched any Jailbreaking solutions.

Also, can anyone recommend a good text to speech app for reading PDF documents? I have a couple ebooks in pdf form and would like to read for a little while and then have the application start reading to me where I tell it to start so I can listen to the book while doing chores. I have them imported into iBooks and it would be great if iBooks could text-to-speech the PDF's as well.

Thanks for your recommendations and insights.

 

[maxburn]

I haven't heard of this before, I don't think these devices have the horsepower to pull this off.

Usually there are audio book versions out there for whatever you are reading, just get that. I am sure the voice in them is going to be better than any text to speech engine.

 

[sinisalo]

Did you go into Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Triple-click Home and set it to "Toggle VoiceOver"? This would enable the voice over. With regards to reading I'm not aware of any product to do that.

 

[wiggy1]

I used the Accessibility options and all they did for PDF was read the Unicode Nd not the text rendered on the PDF. Funny actually, but totally useless. The voice over didn't read any books in Kindle. It did read lines in iBooks though. It would only read iBooks though and not imported PDFs. Also, you would have to tap on each line for it to read, I couldn't get it to read a whole page at once. There are a couple programs that will work by copying text and pasting into r program, but that is a really tedious solution. I am hoping for a program that will be able to open the books directly. Maybe we will see something like this in 2011.