Texting to Alexa

 Noted for using voice in specific context.   Say for the need of privacy in conversation. 

Amazon now lets you text Alexa on iOS to ask for things instead of only using your voice  By Chaim Gartenberg    in MSN.com  via Walter Riker

Amazon is testing a new feature for its iOS Alexa app: the ability to type out Alexa commands, instead of having to ask questions or requests by speaking out loud.

“Type with Alexa is a Public Preview feature available to iOS Alexa app customers allowing you to interact with Alexa without using voice, meaning everything you can currently say to Alexa can now also be typed using your Alexa mobile app. Type with Alexa is available to iOS customers in the U.S.,” said an Amazon spokesperson. ... " 

More on Imminent Audible Captioning

Recently have been reading/hearing long texts in Audible and Kindle,  usually non-fiction.   So gaining an appreciation for the difference in the way we utilize recorded knowledge in varying contexts.  Having the option of having it read to us is good, but seeing it in context provides better retention and integration.     And also has implications for accessibility.   Which leads to this new article in ArsTechnica, considerable additional discussion there:

Seven of the nation's top book publishers sued Amazon subsidiary Audible on Friday, asking federal courts to block the company from releasing a new feature called Audible Captions that's due out next month. The technology does exactly what it sounds like: display text captions on the screen of your phone or tablet as the corresponding words are read in the audio file.

The publishers argue that this is straight-up copyright infringement. In their view, the law gives them the right to control the distribution of their books in different formats. Audio is a different format from text, they reason, so Audible needs a separate license.  ......

The caption feature "is not and was never intended to be a book," Audible explained in an online statement following the lawsuit. "Listeners cannot read at their own pace or flip through pages as they could with a print book or eBook." Instead, the purpose is to allow "listeners to follow along with a few lines of machine-generated text as they listen to the audio performance."

"We disagree with the claims that this violates any rights and look forward to working with publishers and members of the professional creative community to help them better understand the educational and accessibility benefits of this innovation," Audible added.  ... "

Polly Makes for Better Text to Voice

Just heard a demonstration of Amazon's New Polly voice delivery system.    Very much better then the current 'reading' capability.  Will be trying it with some of my test text files.  Key also is the ability to retrain to new voice styles. 

Amazon’s text-to-speech service Polly gets a newscaster-style voice.   in   By Mike Wheatley in Silicon Angle

Amazon Web Services Inc. is taking on Google LLC in human voice replication, adding two new features today to Amazon Polly, a cloud-based service that transforms text into lifelike speech and is used to create applications that can talk.

The first of the new features is called Neural Text-To-Speech, which Amazon says delivers “significant improvements” in speech quality by boosting the “naturalness” and “expressiveness” of synthesized voices.

One of the great things about Neural Text-To-Speech is that it’s able to learn new speaking styles with just a few hours of training, thanks to a new artificial intelligence model that Amazon wrote about in a research paper last year. That model works by combining large amounts of standard, neutral speech with just a few hours of additional voice data in the target speaking style. New supplementary data can be added as desired to create various additional speaking styles.  ....  "

More about AWS Polly.