According to Amazon, Alexa can read certain Kindle books.
Alexa reads Kindle books eligible for Text-to-Speech (an experimental reading technology that allows supported Amazon devices to read Kindle books aloud).
Concept
If it is possible I want to use this feature but instead of reading Kindle books, Alexa should read custom texts or reports made by some smart-home devices. So during the day different devices would report different events like:
- Temperature sensor:
New "highest temperate ever measured": 30 °C.
- Connected dog-feeder:
The dog food container is empty.
- Some kind of sensor:
This happened while you was away and you should know about.
Basically a service would collect all the data from the sensors and would create a report file that could be used with Alexa like:
- Alexa, read 'Afternoon home report'.
- Alexa, read 'Morning home report'.
(So I could ask Alexa at the end of the day "What happened today?" and it could tell me by reading the reports.)
Problems
The reports should be in a correct format to make them eligible for Alexa to read them. I found something about it on Amazon forum, Can I enable Text to Speech on any personal document?
Only if that document will open in the Reading App. Word documents, for instance, that have to be opened in a Word Process app or PDFs that have to opened in a PDF Reader can't use the Text to Speech feature.
All documents in a Kindle compatible format should have Text to Speech available but I send all mine via the Amazon Cloud and Amazon converts them to the Kindle format. A tap in the center of the screen reveals the "Play" icon in the bottom left hand corner.
Also I found an app on Amazon which called "Pdf to Speech" and Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing tool "KindleGen v2.9", but still unclear how it should be done.
Possible solution
One way I have found on Reddit describes the following:
You don't need a kindle device, but you will need to download the kindle app. This gives you a special kindle address, to which you'd mail the PDF, which puts it in your kindle library.
I have several devices, each loaded with the kindle app. So I have several kindle addresses, one per device (me-ipad@kindle, me-nexus@kindle, etc).
The good news: once you email it, the PDF lives in the Kindle Cloud, so it's accessible to all...... Amazon related Kindle page
To have Alexa read it: 1) open Alexa app, go to books, tap desired book; or 2) Alexa, read (title) ..... Amz related Alexa page
All in all, is this Kindle compatible format is actually .mobi
? What steps should I perform to make the reports available by Alexa? (I would like to avoid the e-mailing stuff first if possible.)