Document Reader + Speech

First and foremost thankyou guys so much for such an awesome app. Pleco is easily the most robust and useful Chinese dictionary and language tool I've ever seen with an awesome interface to boot! Thank you a ton!

I'd like to suggest a feature, not quite sure how feasible it is though. For language learners listening is almost as important as reading, especially in Chinese, so I think a useful addition would be the ability to use the Speech add-on in the Web Reader/Document Reader/Pasteboard. It would be especially nice if you could just set it to read the whole document, instead of just one character at a time.

Thank you for your time. :)
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
There actually already is support for speech for individual words in the document reader, but to avoid making the toolbar too crowded we leave it hidden by default - go into Settings / General / Popup Reader / Show audio button and that will add an audio button the toolbar which you can tap on to hear an individual word pronounced.

We're working on a couple of different possibilities for how we might integrate entire-sentence text-to-speech in a future version; one of these may actually show up in a limited, free form in our next update.
 

numble

状元
I very rough workaround, at least on iOS devices, is to set your language settings to Chinese, and enable VoiceOver under accessibility settings (or enable it to be activated by a Triple-click of the Home button). Once you enter "edit" mode on the document reader, enter into VoiceOver mode, and voila* you have a Chinese text-to-speech reader. But it will only read line-by-line, you need to select each line of characters for it to read.

*voila = It only takes about a thousand steps.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
We've got a better way than that for 2.2.2 - very easy one which I'm actually surprised hasn't shown up in any other iPhone Chinese dictionaries yet.
 

numble

状元
The Apple VoiceOver implementation seems to have some AI built-in, it will pause before read things in quotes, it reads numeric dates in Chinese, and I think it does things like change its tone for questions and the like. Do you think something like that could be implemented, if not soon, farther down the line? (Of course Apple opening up that API would probably be nicer...)
 
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