KITABOO partners with Amazon Polly for creating interactive children’s eBooks

By Moulaali Choudhri | Digital Publishing, eBook solution, Education Technology | 0 comment | 1 July, 2022 | 30

Interactive eBooks have enjoyed great love and attention from readers of all ages, especially with Amazon Polly. There is nothing more comforting than a day ending with parents/guardians reading out the eternal fairytales and other colorfully illustrated books as they tuck their children in bed. Whether it’s the storybooks or the learning materials the more colorful and interactive the books the more they attract and hold the attention of the young readers. In today’s times, children are literally born into technology – they take to technology as the fish take to the water. Needless to say, interactive eBooks are giving stiff competition to their physical counterparts.

Digital technologies are increasingly being used to bring alive the stories and even the learning materials, enabling the young learners to learn by doing rather than passively soak up information from the instructors. It is precisely why publishers are converting their existing library of physical books into interactive eBooks. KITABOO, the digital publishing software from HurixDigital, is one of the world’s favorite digital publishing platforms for converting physical books into interactive children’s books. So these eBooks may include features such as storytelling read aloud, touch and feel, audio and video, and sound effects. In the case of digital learning books, the eBooks may include branching scenarios, challenging children to make decisions and learn from their outcomes.

What is Amazon Polly?

Amazon Polly, a Text-to-Speech service, is another popular platform for converting textbooks into lifelike speech. So you can create apps that talk and build entirely new categories of eBooks that are speech-enabled. KITABOO partners with Amazon Polly and uses deep learning technologies to add life-like features to interactive children’s eBooks.

Synergies between the popular digital publishing platforms will make the speech-enabled interactive eBooks all the more exciting. This is why KITABOO has partnered with Amazon Polly to create interactive children’s eBooks and cater to a more inclusive audience also encompassing children with reading disabilities and more. Let us first look at the features of Amazon Polly and KITABOO separately and then discuss how this partnership benefits the tech-savvy young readers.

What are the benefits of Amazon Polly?

Synthesize speech to resemble human voices: As already stated above, Amazon Polly is a Text-to-Speech service that allows you to create an entirely new category of eBooks that are speech-enabled. In other words, using deep learning technologies, the software can synthesize speech that resembles the human voice. It offers dozens of such life-like voices across a wide variety of languages in both male and female voices.

Create speech-enabled eBooks: You can select the voice of your choice and create speech-enabled applications to target audiences of different countries. The fluid pronunciation of text helps to deliver high-quality voice output for a global audience. You can also create speech-enabled interactive eBooks in standard formats like MP3 and OGG, and make them available locally with apps, from the cloud, or devices for offline listening. This digital publishing tool supports lexicons and SSML tags so you can modify the voices available to suit your needs and also control aspects such as pronunciation, pitch, volume, and speed rate.

Integrate speech synthesis: Amazon Polly also includes an API that enables you to quickly integrate speech synthesis into your app. You just need to send the text that you want to convert into speech to the Amazon Polly API, and this digital tool will instantly return the audio stream to your application. You can immediately begin streaming it directly or store it in a standard audio file format, such as MP3 on the app.

KITABOO partners with Amazon Polly for English and European languages

KITABOO is a cutting-edge digital publishing platform that is much sought after by digital publishers across the globe to convert their physical assets including print books into digital ones at scale. KITABOO partners with Amazon Polly to render a superior digital content experience. Let us take a closer look at the benefits of partnering with Amazing Polly.

Complete automation for English and European languages: KITABOO partners with Amazon Polly to facilitate 100% automated support for English and European languages. However, for languages such as Chinese and Arabic, KITABOO offers 60% automation with 40% manual work to sync the audio content with the exact Chinese or Arabic words and sentences as required.

Read-aloud Features

Interactive immersive features: Leveraging various digital media technologies, you can bring alive children’s eBooks with audio and video, graphics, 3D, simulations, and animations. In the case of eLearning interactive textbooks for children, you can gamify the content, that is, present branching scenarios. Children can thus follow different paths and see the outcomes of their decisions. They can also course-correct and then move towards the learning goal. Thus, KITABOO helps create interactive children’s books that enable young learners to learn by trial and error and build their reasoning and problem-solving skills. Then again, with simulations, you can transport the children to different parts of the world they are learning about in virtual reality settings. Rather than just reading about these places, children can actually see and experience them firsthand. Thus interactive eBooks promote engaging and immersive learning with long-term retention. KITABOO helps tune in with modern pedagogical practices and helps to make learning fun, entertaining, relevant, and contextual by partnering with Amazon Polly.

Mobile-ready content: KITABOO helps create interactive eBooks that are mobile-ready. In other words, you can create responsive content which can be accessed on all major operating devices. Till date, it has processed and converted more than 10 million pages for top publishers across the world. KITABOO also offers an intuitive interface, an offline reader, book download capabilities, annotation tools, and search and social learning. It can also be integrated with third-party apps such as Amazon Polly to generate synergies from the combined features, resulting in an enhanced experience for the young readers.

In Conclusion

The technological partnership between KITABOO and Amazon Polly will prove useful for the publishers and young readers. KITABOO enables the conversion of physical assets into digital assets at scale. Powered by emerging digital technologies, KITABOO can be used to add various kinds of interactive features such as images, graphics, animations, branching scenarios, simulations, and more. These features make the reading experience more immersive, relevant, and engaging. Amazon Polly, on the other hand, is text-to-speech software that can be used to voice the content in several languages from across the world. It can generate speech in dozens of languages, making it easy to add speech to applications, such as websites, RSS feeds, or videos. It can also be used to provide an enhanced visual experience such as karaoke-style word highlighting and speech-synchronized facial animation. You can optimize your streaming video and control tone, speech rate, pitch, and loudness. Thus, this partnership between KITABOO and Amazon Polly will greatly enhance the creation of interactive eBooks and take the reading experience to the next level, and to a wider audience. Further speech-enabled interactive eBooks will also cater to a more inclusive audience, especially to children with dyslexia and reading disabilities.

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