Your books, read aloud
Neural narration built into the app.
Android 8 and above. Version 1.2.
Батюшка у окна читал Придворный календарь, ежегодно им получаемый. Эта книга имела всегда сильное на него влияние: он никогда не перечитывал её без особенного участия. Матушка, знавшая наизусть все его обычаи, всегда старалась засунуть несчастную книгу как можно подалее.
Alexander Pushkin. The Captain's Daughter
What people say
I had been looking for a reader with a living voice for a long time, and this one is a candidate for a donation from me. Gave it five stars up front.
Wonderful app, the pronunciation is quite natural, almost like a person.
Even as it is, this will help a lot of partially sighted people read: not everyone has the internet, and not always.
Very good idea, and well done 👍
Voice
A system synthesiser reads letters in a row. Here the sentence is parsed first: where the stress falls, what an abbreviation stands for, how a number should be said. Russian is where this matters most, because stress is never written down and it changes the word.
| Он стоял у окна | okná, by the window — not ókna, windows |
| Дверной замок | zámok the castle and zamók the lock are spelled the same |
| См. на стр. 14 | read out as see on page fourteen |
| В 1990-х годах | the decade spoken in full, in the right case |
| Все еще здесь? | the letter ё comes back even when the typesetter dropped it |
Five Russian voices; English runs on a separate engine. The app works out the language of a book by itself. Speed and voice switch mid-chapter.
Why 240 megabytes
That is what the voice models weigh. They sit inside the app. Synthesis runs on the device itself and does not depend on a connection.
What it does
The shelf
A queue of books to play back to back. One ends, the next starts from its own saved position.
Plays in the background
Screen off, controls in the notification shade and on the lock screen. There is a sleep timer. A call pauses it; hang up and it carries on.
A chapter as a file
Saved as m4a; an hour of narration comes to a few dozen megabytes. Drop it into a player or the car.
Finds books by itself
No digging through folder trees: the app offers Downloads, Books and Documents in one tap and looks inside nested folders.
Moving to a new phone
The library exports as a single file: books, positions, bookmarks, categories. On the new phone it imports with a merge and overwrites nothing. No cloud involved.
Five page themes
From warm paper to midnight for OLED. Typeface, size and margins are yours to set.
How it looks
About your data
The app collects nothing about you. It does not even hold an internet permission.