Text to speech in Reader

[fortunecat]

I bought a Boox Page just so I could use Pleco on an ereader that’s easy for the eyes. I’ve been using Pleco on iOS this entire time to read stories in Chinese or listen to the natural-sounding text-to-speech, and the eyestrain of looking at a LED screen for hours is just too much.

I hope it’s just me and not because the Pleco reader on Android is not as good as iOS. When I use tts in the reader on Android, the dictionary window can’t be closed so it blocks a lot of text. There is no option to close the window or select reading speed like there is in the reader in iOS. I also can’t use the tts voice I purchased (Qiang). Is that iOS-only? And the reading speed seems to be set at a slower 70%. I use 100% or 104% reading speed in iOS for natural-sounding speech.

I can add screenshots if needed. Help please because I bought an ereader just to be able to use the tts so I can listen and read and select definitions.

 

[mikelove]

You can adjust the speed and hide the bubble while playing by long pressing the 'megaphone' icon - that should show up a popup menu that lets you configure both of those things.

As far as why Qiang is missing, did you copy over the Registration ID from the Pleco "Registration" screen on your iOS device? If so, is it listed under 'purchased but not downloaded' in the "Add-ons" screen?

 

[fortunecat]

Thank you, Mike! I have figured out how to hide the bubble and adjust the tts speed as well as play Qiang's voice.

I've been playing around with Pleco's reader on my Android ereader (Boox Page). Some more feedback and observations about Android's functionality versus iOS and possible bugs:

- If I open epub in the reader, I can't use the scroll bar at the bottom to navigate throughout the epub. I usually paste online content in Apple Pages and then export to ePub to read on my ereader, so this might be an issue with Apple Pages' conversion. Are there better word processing converters?

- If I open txt in the reader, I can use the scroll bar. However, when I use tts, every time a new page loads, the definition popup appears and pauses the tts regardless of whether I selected it or not. This does not happen with epub.

- The tts in the Pleco Android reader pauses for a long time at periods, sometimes as long as 10 seconds and I have to press tts again to activate. This has never been an issue on iOS.

Any insight would be appreciated!

 

[mikelove]

- If I open epub in the reader, I can't use the scroll bar at the bottom to navigate throughout the epub. I usually paste online content in Apple Pages and then export to ePub to read on my ereader, so this might be an issue with Apple Pages' conversion. Are there better word processing converters?

I'd export it to plaintext instead, that should work more cleanly.

- If I open txt in the reader, I can use the scroll bar. However, when I use tts, every time a new page loads, the definition popup appears and pauses the tts regardless of whether I selected it or not. This does not happen with epub.

Is this specifically happening when you're reading through the document with TTS? What about if you set it to scroll continuously rather than paginate?

- The tts in the Pleco Android reader pauses for a long time at periods, sometimes as long as 10 seconds and I have to press tts again to activate. This has never been an issue on iOS.

So it does play eventually, it just pauses for a bit? It might be taking a while to generate the (now AI / neutral network based) audio, which suggests that we should tune it to do that in smaller chunks (at the cost of interrupting more often). The Boox Page appears to have about the same speed processor as a 2016 iPhone, and while in general that shouldn't be a big problem on an e-book reader - and might even be a good thing inasmuch as it helps with battery life - for this specific demanding application it might cause some hiccups.

Where did you download Pleco from? If you're using the latest Google Play version, maybe consider uninstalling it and downloading this older version from our website - it uses an older/faster (but less realistic-sounding) version of our TTS engines and might perform better for you.