Audio books have long been an easy way to get stuck into reading, but if you’re at home and want to listen, the solution has been to plug your phone into speak or read it yourself. Now, Alexa can do it.
Amazon’s Alexa speaker is beginning to rack up the skills, and between being able to help you do your banking, control parts of your home, order a pizza, and tell you what’s been happening on the news, Amazon’s smart speaker is beginning to really get a feel for how it can integrate in your life.
And now it’s adding reading to its skill list, talking to one of Amazon’s other services, Audible, reading books from an Audible account and being compatible with audiobooks found inside the Kindle app.
Not all audio books will link between Kindle and Audible, but there are 30,000 that do and a good 200,000 Audible audio books in total, providing a good selection of spoken word books that can be played on the Amazon Echo smart speakers.
Linking the two should be easy, while running the Audible service simply has you tell Alexa to read the name of the book. You can pause the reading, resume the reading, and if you’re reading on a Kindle and it has support for audio book, it will remember where you last read using WhisperSync, and remember where you stop using the same technology.
Audio books is one thing Google’s Home can’t do, and neither can Apple’s HomePod, not natively anyway. Sonos can, however, providing at least one other option.
Owners of both, however, will find Audible access on their device, though they’ll want an Audible account to start with.
