Reading & Text-to-Speech Settings
Reader Preferences is arguably the single most important settings screen in this entire app, because it's the shared configuration behind nearly every tool that speaks text aloud to you — get it right here once, and every reading experience across Tech Assistant improves at the same time. A Read Mode selector lets you choose how text is broken up as it's read: by characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, or lines, each confirmed aloud as you select it — "read line by line," for instance — so you always know exactly what rhythm you've chosen. If you pick characters specifically, a further "Characters per chunk" stepper lets you set exactly how many characters are grouped into each spoken unit.
Two core steppers shape how your chosen voice actually sounds: Speech Rate, adjustable as a percentage and announced aloud with every change — "speech rate increased to 65%" — and Pitch, controlled the same way. Three toggles round out the behavioral side: whether the next page reads automatically once the current one finishes, whether reading starts automatically the moment a page loads, and whether speech stops the instant you background the app.
The Speech Engine section is where you choose the actual voice technology doing the speaking, offering your device's system default alongside any other text-to-speech engines installed on your phone. Once you've picked an engine, a Language and Voice section lets you narrow down to a specific language — with genuinely broad coverage across roughly eighty languages and locales — and a specific named voice within that language, rather than settling for whatever voice happens to be your device's default. A clear note warns that some non-default voices may rely on an online connection and introduce a small delay, so it's worth testing before committing to one for offline use.
A "Test voice configuration" button lets you hear your exact current settings read back a short sample sentence before you commit to them, toggling to "Stop test" while playing. And if you ever want to start fresh, a "Reset to defaults" button restores every setting on this screen to its original values in one tap — a genuinely reassuring safety net while you're experimenting to find the voice and pace that feels right for you.