Listening while you read

Overview

A floating control bar sits at the bottom of the reader and reads the current text aloud. It works on any book, in any language you're reading.

What's on the control bar

• Play/pause starts or stops reading from where you are.
• Previous/next steps by sentence or paragraph, so you can jump back to something you missed without restarting the page.
• Speed cycles through a few speeds, from full speed down to noticeably slower. The voice's pitch doesn't change as it slows down.

Choosing a voice

Lexxio picks a good default voice for each language automatically the first time you use read-aloud in that language, and downloads it in the background. If you'd rather use a different voice, open the voice picker in the control bar, or change it from Settings.

Mandarin single words work differently

When you tap a single word or character to hear it pronounced, Mandarin uses a different, more reliable path than full-sentence reading. It plays a pre-recorded reference clip when one exists for that word, and falls back to your device's own system voice when it doesn't. This is because the app's neural voices are tuned for full sentences and can mispronounce a word or character on its own.

You can set which voice (male or female) is used for this reference audio in Settings, under Learning, as "Reference Audio Voice". The same setting also controls the voice used for word lookups and the dictionary.