Readobook: books read aloud

xmel01

About this app

Readobook reads your books aloud in a natural voice. The neural models are bundled inside the app and run on the phone itself: no connection is needed, not on first launch and not later. The app does not even hold an internet permission.

Free. No ads, no subscriptions, no in-app purchases, no sign-up.

A VOICE, NOT A ROBOT
Ordinary readers hand the text to the system synthesiser and you get a station announcer. Here the sentence is parsed before it is spoken:
- Stress placement: a 17,000-word dictionary plus a neural model. In Russian the same spelling can be two different words, and the meaning of the sentence decides which one is said
- Numbers are spoken in full and in the right grammatical case
- Abbreviations are expanded rather than spelled out letter by letter
- Intonation follows punctuation: statements, questions and exclamations sound different
- Five Russian voices; English runs on its own engine and is picked up automatically from the language of the book
- Speed and voice can be changed while reading

READING AND LISTENING ARE ONE THING
- A single position per book: stop reading and the voice continues from there
- The spoken sentence is highlighted and the page follows it
- Bookmarks with quote, chapter and date, kept apart from the reading position
- The shelf: a queue of books played back to back

LIBRARY
- EPUB, FB2, FB2.ZIP, PDF, TXT, RTF, HTML, Markdown
- A folder of books is scanned whole, nested folders of any depth included
- Categories, sorting, reading history, covers taken from the book
- The whole library moves to a new phone as one file: books, positions, bookmarks, categories. No cloud, no account
- Progress is counted in words rather than markup elements

BACKGROUND AND COMFORT
- Playback continues with the screen off, controlled from the notification shade and the lock screen
- Sleep timer, pause on incoming call and resume afterwards
- Page turning with the volume keys
- Five page themes, your own typeface, size, margins and alignment
- A chapter can be exported as an m4a file and played anywhere

WHY THE APP IS LARGE
The voice models ship inside the app instead of being downloaded from a server. That is why a book keeps reading on the underground, on a plane and anywhere with no signal at all.

PRIVACY
The app collects nothing about you and cannot send anything anywhere: it holds no internet permission. No analytics, no ad SDKs, no trackers, no account.

Website: https://xmel01.github.io/readobook_doc/en/