While we and the rest of the world are still waiting on Amazon’s next batch of Kindle e-readers, announced earlier this week, our retail overlords have some big plans for its hardware line-up. Surprise, surprise: they involve AI. Kindle is no stranger to artificial intelligence, and now Amazon is building upon what’s already available.
Smartening up your Kindle
We’ve all been there, coming back to a long-forgotten book that you put down halfway through, only to be distracted by something else. Some might enjoy re-reading those early bits to get back to see beyond what they already have. Others… don’t, preferring to leave the book at the bottom of the pile. ‘Story So Far’ fixes that.
With the help of AI, your Kindle can give you a handy summary of the book’s events — but only up to where you are. It’ll give you the low-down on who’s betrayed who, and who’s climbing into whose bed, all without revealing any potentially sensitive plot points that might be considered a spoiler.
Read More: Amazon’s new Kindle Scribe adds a splash of colour, and the Echo puts on a show
Then there’s ‘Ask this Book’, which allows readers to highlight any passage of text and receive spoiler-free answers to any questions they might have. Ask it a character’s motive, or the significance of any passage, and it’ll blurt it out — again, keeping in mind the readers’ place in the book.
It’s not clear yet which devices the features will arrive on when they’re ready to roll out sometime next year. We can guess it’ll include the company’s latest Kindle Scribes, and possibly the latest Paperwhite model, assuming a new one hasn’t been released by then. Amazon says it will work for “thousands of Kindle books”. Anyone looking to test it out even sooner can expect the update to hit the Kindle iOS app later this year.
