Update: 21 April 2020

After spending a few weeks looking into the various areas of most importance, it would appear that we have hit a dead end, in that they all suffer with the same key issue: copyright blocking and service delivery.

Specifically, it appears that while the various devices and platforms are more than capable of handling the technical specifics of what we would have liked to implement, they are all essentially blocked due to the intellectual property restrictions in place, in addition to the respective companies (publishers and technology partners) wanting to protect revenue by selling audiobooks on the platforms and blocking the upload and delivery of a user's own (or in our case, the University's) eBooks.

We can break down the specific issue in slightly more detail as follows:

• eBook delivery via smart speakers:
  The services being delivered to the various speakers are dependant on having content available to be read. To do this, the user will usually buy a book from the store and it will appear in their cloud library for that service, making it available to the smart speaker. Some partners are permitted to use this service (e.g. Audible for Echo and Kindle devices) and can also supply their content on the device.
  
  However, all of the content needs to be approved first and this is usually only a very small set of available content, usually specific titles that publishers want to provide (e.g. selling an additional service on top of the eBook sale), but also some titles provided as part of a subscription, e.g. Amazon Kindle Unlimited titles, that can be read by Alexa. However, the amount of titles available is small even within the permitted library of titles available. Even Amazon's Kindle Unlimited titles tend to be limited, with none of my own personal library available to be read aloud.
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• Smart Assistant narration of eBooks as an alternative to DAISY books, including adaptive playback controls:
  The problem with this is not the ability of the smart assistants to read aloud, as Google Assistant and Alexa can both do this and this can be seen by how Google Assistant can read web pages aloud using Waveform and Alexa can read Kindle books (although Alexa is a slightly less capable reader). If you want to see a demo of how authentic the voice can sound, check out Google's Waveform demo here: https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech
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  The issue is that the devices can't get the content to read. Google permit audiobooks in the Google Play Books app and cloud reader and you can add your own eBooks into the Library, but these cannot then be read by the Google Assistant. Upon researching, it seems this is due to copyright, but it means that the reader is unable to do its job. Similar is true for Alexa.
  
  This may be something that could change in the future and Google are indeed working on opening up access to the Waveform reader, demonstrated by their new 'Read It' function for Android, that reads web pages out (see a video outlining the functionality here)
  
  Hopefully the various companies involved will ease the restrictions on what can or cannot be accessed on smart devices soon, as it will enable huge benefits for those with accessible requirements, as well as other users.

• automated audio content creation as an alternative to human-voiced audio creation:
  As above, this can technically be achieved, but it cannot be delivered as a service for our content as yet. This is hopefully something that will change soon.
  
• delivering other content via smart displays and Smart TVs:
  Our research shows that the content we were considering, namely interactive elements and quizzes, simply cannot be delivered onto these platforms currently as they are so locked down. The smart displays only exhibit a few traits of tablet devices, despite having similar technology built into them, and they only support a few applications. While the support for other apps and services is starting to get bigger (for example, Adobe can now push prototypes of Creative Cloud apps and content to Echo Shows) it still has a long way to go before it can handle this type of content on an everyday basis. With regard to Smart TVs in particular, it would seem that these are still locked down to media consumption apps, like Netflix and Disney+, and educational support is almost non-existent, currently.

So, despite the devices generally being technically capable, there is quite some way for the various services to go before we could utilise them without first forming a specific partnership with the individual companies. Whilst that is something that we may look into in the future, in light of the current situation with COVID-19, it looks extremely unlikely that we will be able to do something in the relatively small timeframe available. It does, however, highlight the need and potential for such services going forwards, particularly if the lockdown situation in many countries persists.