Listen 2 Reader

v1.13 Phonon Voices, Built In Listen2 now comes with Phonon, a new voice engine, and all 25 of its English voices are installed with the app. There is nothing to download before you start listening, and the voices work without an internet connection. Hadley is the new default voice. Phonon runs on your device's Neural Engine, so it starts speaking quickly and uses very little power, even through long chapters. Its word highlighting uses a timing model trained on Phonon's own voices. Zara Is Now a Download Zara used to be built into Listen2. She is now a Piper voice you download from the Voice Library like any other. If Zara was your voice, Listen2 switches you to Hadley after this update, and you can download Zara again whenever you like. Figure Descriptions When a figure description finished, the book sometimes did not pick up again, and a description could start over and over. It happened most often when headphones disconnected or another sound interrupted the description, or when you used the lock screen or headphone buttons while a description was playing. Descriptions now always hand back to the book, and those buttons control the description while it is showing. A new setting, Show During Descriptions, picks what is on screen while a description is read aloud. Text shows the written description, as before. Image shows the figure full screen, with buttons to pause, switch to the text, or close it and go back to the book. You will find it in the Audio settings, under Read Figure Descriptions. Listening With Your Phone Locked While your phone is locked, iOS limits how much processing an app can use. Some voices, Kokoro in particular, could go over that limit, and iOS would close Listen2 without warning. Listen2 now keeps track of its own processing and slows its work to stay inside the limit. If it still cannot keep up, it pauses at the end of a sentence and tells you, in the voice's own language, to unlock your phone. Unlock and press play, and it continues from the next sentence. A New Look for Word Highlighting The word being read now sits on a soft yellow marker in light mode and a blue one in dark mode. Switching Voices Choosing another Supertonic or Phonon voice now takes effect right away. Before, the sentences already prepared in the old voice kept playing until you skipped ahead. Reading PDFs Listen2 has a new PDF engine under the hood. Most documents read exactly as before. Some read better, including a few whose table of contents used to come through incomplete or garbled.