Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook service, continues to experiment with AI to improve audiobook discovery and offer customized recommendations. The latest feature - AI-powered tags, which analyze customer feedback to offer suggestions according to individual preferences and topic pages that helps users to find similar audio books. The experiment is only available to USA users with iOS and Android devices. Through a new “Tags” carousel in the app, Audible’s AI analyzes customer reviews and briefly explains why other listeners enjoyed a specific audiobook. This allows you to quickly get to the point without having to read numerous reviews.

Mebook has launched the new M6C Color e-reader on Amazon for $199. It features a 6-inch E INK Kaleido 3-color e-paper display with color resolution of 536 × 724 with 150 PPI, and it can showcase 4096 different colors. The body hue is a lovely soft white on the front and back plating. The battery is 2200mAh, which should be adequate for a month of reading; its dimensions are 5.02 x 3.6 x 0.25 inches, weighing 90 grams. Mebook M6C has Google Android 11. The UI is heavily customized with a bright and cheerful user interface, making it easy to use your fingers to engage with all the functionality. However, Android 11 is a bit outdated; lots of their competitors are running Android 12, and some are using Android 13, which provides better long-term app support, not to mention additional security.

Ello, the AI reading companion that aims to assist kids struggling to read, launched a new product that enables kids to participate in the story-creation process. Called “Storytime,” the new AI-powered feature helps kids generate personalized tales by choosing from a selection of settings, characters, and plots. For example, a story about a hamster named Greg who performed in a talent show in outer space. Kids can pick from dozens of prompts, resulting in thousands of combinations. Like Ello’s usual reading offering, the AI companion — a bright blue, friendly elephant — listens to the child read aloud and evaluates their speech to correct mispronunciations and missed words. If kids are uncertain how to pronounce a specific word, they can tap on the question mark icon for additional help. Storytime offers two reading options: one mode where Ello and the reader take turns and another, simpler mode for younger readers where Ello does most of the reading.

Amazon has begun sending out emails notifying customers about their plan to discontinue the Flashcards feature on Kindles. The Flashcards feature allows you to review words that you’ve looked up in the dictionary and mark them as mastered. However, the Vocabulary Builder feature will remain, so you can still review looked up words, just not using flashcards. Amazon already started removing the Flashcards feature from Kindle apps, and they intend to do away with Flashcards entirely in November of 2024. Users can request the flashcards associated with their account from this page at Amazon and continue using them on their own devices, but all flashcards will be deleted from Amazon’s servers later this year, so you need to download them soon.

Audible, Amazon’s audiobook division, revealed that it will develop AI trained on the voices of professional narrators to produce new audiobook recordings. A select group of audiobook narrators based in the U.S. will be invited to train the AI with their voices starting this week, according to Audible. The trained AI will be employed to generate recordings, and narrators will have the opportunity to approve their synthetic voice for particular works, as well as modify the pronunciation and pacing. Audible states that narrators who engage in the program will be compensated for any audiobooks produced using their AI-generated voices on a title-by-title, royalty-sharing basis.

Norwegian company reMarkable has launched a new model, Paper Pro, that brings the company’s vision of merging PC with paper closer to fruition, adding color and functionality while preserving the philosophy of focus. The $499 Paper Pro — a new naming scheme to signify it as a premium alternative to the now-$379 reMarkable 2, not a direct successor — is noteworthy for its inclusion of both color and a "frontlight," though both features are somewhat subdued. The color remains subtle, and you wouldn’t want to read a comic on the device, but the purpose of adding color is to enhance interactive and creative possibilities. Previously, you were confined to black and white, but now you can highlight, circle, jot, and sketch in several distinct colors (they blend but appear best in their pure form). The new frontlight is designed to replace the need for external light shining on the screen, not to serve as a light source itself. It’s also fixed to a specific color temperature range because too much variation would affect the color tone.

Apple Podcasts can now be streamed from the web. It functions on all major web browsers (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari) in over 170 countries. Apple Podcasts on the web enables users to access features that were previously only available on the app. These include exploring millions of audiobooks, accessing sections like Library and Top Charts, purchasing premium podcast subscriptions, and more. Listeners can sync their Apple Accounts to be able to pause a podcast and save their playback progress to listen later, as well as view their followed shows and subscriptions. Users without an Apple Account can also use the web experience but can only explore and listen.

ElevenLabs is a new AI text-to-speech e-reading application. It supports 32 distinct languages from around the globe. The primary selling point is its ability to read PDF files, articles, newsletters, EPUB books, and most web content aloud. However, it does not read Apple Books or Kindle Books as it doesn’t support DRM. There are numerous narrators available, which distinguishes it from many other reading apps. Users can listen to the voices of Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds, or Sir Laurence Olivier. ElevenLabs states that the iconic voices are exclusively accessible through the app and for individual streaming. The app is completely free to download and use. The company mentioned it might explore a path to monetization sometime in the future. Developers plan to add more features to the app, such as offline support, OCR, and audio snippet sharing. Therefore, they will support this initiative for a long time.

Amazon has partnered with Peloton to allow users read books while exercising on home-bikes and treadmills. To access the Kindle library you need to log into Amazon account directly on the bike screen and navigate to the Entertainment tab at the bottom. The integration provides a rather weird reading experience. You can turn pages with a tap, adjust font size, quickly navigate between chapters create bookmarks to continue reading from where you left off and turn on full-screen display. This new Kindle feature is currently available exclusively in Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

YouTube is testing a new sleep timer feature for its Premium users, allowing them to pause videos after a set time, which is particularly useful for those who fall asleep to long podcasts or audio books. The timer can be enabled on desktop via a specific page or on mobile through the “Settings > Try experimental new features” option, and it appears in the video player's Settings menu. Users can choose to pause playback after intervals ranging from 10 minutes to the end of the video, and a pop-up will appear to extend the timer if needed. While this feature has been available on Spotify for some time, YouTube is now catching up with its introduction.