A voice for every language

Short answer: in Lectern the narration voice belongs to a language, not to a book. Leave it on Auto and Lectern picks the best voice your phone can keep up with for each language you read in. Pick one yourself when you like a particular voice, and Lectern remembers it for every book in that language.

Why per language

A voice can only read the languages it was trained on. An English voice reading a Dutch novel sounds like a tourist reading a menu. So Lectern keeps one choice per language: your Dutch books get a Dutch voice, your English books an English one, and opening a book in a new language never borrows the wrong voice. If a book’s language is detected wrongly, set the narration language in the Advanced tab and the voice follows.

The four rows

In a book, open the reader settings, go to Audio and open Voice. For the book’s language you see up to four rows:

• System: the voices your phone already has, including engines you installed yourself. They start instantly and sound simpler.
• Piper: light neural voices, one per download, in 11 languages.
• Supertonic: ten voices per download, in up to 31 languages, comfortable on mid-range phones. More about Supertonic.
• Kokoro: the heaviest, about 350 MB, very natural in the eight languages it reads, made for fast phones.

Each row starts with a plain quality word for that language: Very natural, Natural, Simple, or Not yet reviewed when nobody has checked the voice by ear in that language yet. A row also says when a voice is light, or heavy for your phone.

Which engines read your language

Supertonic also reads Korean, Russian, Polish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese and a dozen more European languages; Piper adds Polish and Swedish.

What Auto does

Auto looks at the voices you have downloaded for the book’s language and takes the most natural one your phone can run without stalling. Lectern measures that on the phone itself, so the same setting can choose Kokoro on a flagship and Supertonic or Piper on a three-year-old mid-ranger. With nothing downloaded yet, the system voice reads, and Lectern suggests a more natural voice once.

When to choose yourself

• You like a particular voice. Tap play next to it, compare, and pick it. Supertonic and Kokoro each have several voices per language to choose from.
• You want it lighter. On an older phone, or to save battery on a long listen, a Piper voice is the calm choice.
• You want it heavier. Lectern warns when a voice may stutter on your phone, but it doesn’t stop you. Try it: some phones keep up better than the measurement predicts.

Whatever you pick, speed goes up to 3x, the spoken sentence is highlighted, and everything runs offline once the voice is downloaded. Prefer a voice from another app, such as RHVoice or a paid engine? Add your own speech engine.

Frequently asked