The One Thing Every TTS Listener Hates
Modern on-device voices are remarkably natural — until they meet Hermione, Siobhan, Nguyen, a fantasy city with three apostrophes, or a company acronym everyone at work says as a word. The voice takes a guess, and it takes the same guess on every page. VocaRead's custom pronunciations exist precisely for this.
How to Add a Pronunciation
- While listening, long-press the word in the text (or open the line menu on the current line).
- Choose Pronunciation.
- Type how it should be said — spell it phonetically the way you'd explain it to a friend: "Shi-VAWN", "Nwin", "Nasa" for NASA.
- Tap the play button to hear the result, adjust, and save.
From then on, the rule applies everywhere the word appears — in that book and in every other book in your library. Rules sync via iCloud to your iPad too, and apply on both reading engines.
Tips for Writing Good Rules
- Write sounds, not spellings. The voice reads your replacement literally. "Sean" → "Shawn" works; "Sean (Irish)" doesn't.
- Use hyphens for syllables and capitals for stress. "her-MY-oh-nee" is clearer than "hermione".
- Match the language of the voice. A French voice reads phonetic English differently from an English voice. Write the replacement as the voice would read it.
- Acronyms: to spell them out, separate the letters: "A P I". To say them as a word, write the word: "Nasa".
- Test in a sentence. Play the line, not just the word — stress patterns change in context.
Managing Your Rules
All your rules live in one list, reachable from the player menu. Edit or delete a rule there, and search it when a library grows to dozens of entries. Rules are yours: nothing is sent to us, and they're included in iCloud sync along with bookmarks and highlights.
When It's Not the Name
Sometimes the odd reading isn't a name but a number, a date, or a unit — "1984" read as a year versus a quantity, "5 km" versus "5 kilometers". Recent versions of VocaRead handle numerals much more carefully, and the new reading engine improves prosody around them. If something still sounds wrong, a pronunciation rule for that exact token fixes it, and reporting it helps us fix it for everyone.
Custom pronunciations are one of the reasons on-device TTS can read a book you love as well as a recording does — see our TTS vs. audiobooks comparison. Download VocaRead and teach it your first name tonight.