Pause the read out

[claell]

On longer articles it would be useful to pause the read out and continue later. I am not sure whether it is possible to implement such functionality, maybe at least the last position in an article can be saved when leaving the Skill and it can be asked whether the user wants to continue from this position.

[petergtz]

@claell If you mean by "position" the position where she last started reading, then yes, that is indeed possible. And I like the feature request.

In general though, there is no way to determine how much of the text that you give her to read, she has already read. It's super annoying for exactly those use cases where you would like to pause. I've had this issues with other skills that I'm consuming myself too.

Anyway, I think the experience could indeed be improved by persisting where she last started to read and make that available.

[claell]

Ideally of course it would remember exactly where it was, but unfortunately that does not seem to be possible. I guess passing sentence by sentence to her to be able to detect progress on the sentence level will also not work, since it is not possible to let her read out several times?

[petergtz]

since it is not possible to let her read out several times?

Yes, exactly.

I think, what others have done to work around it, is that they use a comletely different service to do the TTS and then let alexa simply play that sound. That gives you a lot more control, but it's (a) complete overkill for my little side project Wikipedia skill :-) and (b) I think you won't get the Alexa voice.

[claell]

Yes, exactly.

Alright, too bad.

I also thought about only playing a sound file, but also thought of the overkill and maybe server (and TTS) costs that might arise.