Ru turns books into audiobooks, entirely on your iPhone, with no network. Listen to your own books, or pick one of 160 free classics in Ru's Library.
RU'S LIBRARY
• 160 public-domain books, free to download: 54 in Vietnamese and 106 in English
• English: Pride and Prejudice, Sherlock Holmes, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Jane Eyre, Little Women, Anna Karenina, Treasure Island and more, from Standard Ebooks' carefully proofread editions
• Vietnamese: Truyện Kiều, Lục Vân Tiên, Tắt đèn, Số đỏ, Giông tố, the stories of Nam Cao and Thạch Lam, Thơ mới poetry and more
• Arranged by kind, with original covers from old printings and classic paintings
• Every author and translator died before 1956, so the books are in the public domain everywhere
VIETNAMESE AND ENGLISH BOOKS
Ru recognises a book's language when you add it. Vietnamese books are read by Vietnamese voices, including the English words and sentences mixed into them. English books are read by English voices, with dates, years, money and Roman numerals spoken the English way. A document in another language is turned away with a short message. The interface is in Vietnamese or English.
Import an EPUB, PDF, Word, TXT or Kindle (PRC, MOBI, AZW, AZW3) file from Files or iCloud, or paste a link to an article, and listen. Text extraction and speech synthesis both run on the device: your books never leave your phone, and the app works the same in airplane mode.
EIGHT VOICES
• Four Vietnamese voices: a woman and a man from the North, the same from the South
• Four English narrators: American and British, a woman and a man, warm and calm for night-time listening
• Three come built in; the others download once (about 61 MB each) and then work offline
• Switch voices while listening; tap a voice you don't have yet to download it
• Designed with AI from written descriptions; no real person's voice is copied
LISTEN ANYWHERE
• Five speeds, adjustable while playing
• Background playback with lock screen controls
• Keeps playing when you leave the reader, with a mini player in the library
• Remembers your place in every book and, if you turn it on, syncs it (and the books too, if you like) to your other iPhone and iPad through iCloud
SLEEP TIMER
Choose a number of minutes, or "end of this chapter". The volume fades over a few seconds and then stops, instead of cutting off abruptly and waking you.
A TIDY LIBRARY
• Covers taken from the books themselves
• Folders, drag and drop to arrange, rename books
• Search by title, or for any sentence in your books, even typed without diacritics
• Search inside the book you're reading, then tap a result to listen from there
READ YOUR WAY
• The page looks like the book: paragraphs flow and poems keep their lines
• The sentence being read is highlighted; tap any sentence to listen from there
• Table of contents taken from the book itself
• Adjustable text size and reading background, including a dark page for night
BUILT FOR VIETNAMESE
Numbers, dates, times, percentages and units become natural spoken Vietnamese. Poems are recognised by their form (lục bát, song thất lục bát, seven- and five-syllable verse, eight-word verse, free verse) and read to its rhythm. Pauses follow punctuation, brackets and line breaks, so the narration sounds relaxed rather than mechanical.
PRIVATE BY DESIGN
No account. Your books are never uploaded to any server of ours; sync, if you turn it on, goes through your own iCloud.
FREE, WITH ADS
Ru is free and shows ads when your phone is online: a banner on the library screen, and now and then an ad when you open a book (never the bundled books). Never while you are listening, and never inside the reader.
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