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The Rewind and Fast Forward buttons on the notification will jump by approximately 30 seconds back and forth. Because the buttons always jump to the beginning of a sentence, it is possible that the actual time is not exactly 30 seconds. If your book has very long sentences, the actual skip time may vary significantly.

The Fast Forward button skips ahead to the first sentence that starts after at least 30 seconds. It is possible that the jump will go to the next chapter. The Rewind button goes to the first sentence that starts at least 30 seconds back. It is possible that the jump will go to the previous chapter.

Evie will also display the Book Author, Book title and the Current Chapter on your Bluetooth device, if your device supports that. If your device has a way to display the progress of what’s being played, the progress bar will tell you how far along you are in the current chapter.

Evie can automatically start speaking out loud when a Bluetooth device is connected and it will stop speaking when the device disconnects. You turn this feature on or off from Settings.

Some wired phones have volume buttons and a play / pause button, which toggle speaking.

Also, when you plug in an audio jack, Evie will start speaking and when you plug it out, it will stop speaking.

Application Features

When Evie starts up, it will automatically re-open the last book you were reading. You can turn this feature off from Settings.

If there is a Cover Image stored in the book, it will be displayed there. Some books don’t have a cover image so Evie will display some info about the book, like Author and Title.
For PDF files, Evie uses the first page in the document as cover image.

When using Amazon Polly, the Table of Content also allows you to download audio content in advance, so you can listen to it offline.
Amazon Polly and Azure Speech are cloud services so their voices are only available online. Still, Evie stores the generated audio on your phone and you can replay it any number of times without generating additional costs.

Normally, each sentence is converted to audio as reading advances, which works well even on 3G mobile data, but it does require Internet. If you know you are going to be out of coverage and you want to be able to use cloud voices, you can pre-render the audio content for one or more chapters, or the entire book in advance.

To be able to use this any time, Evie offers an Offline Mode for Polly and Azure Speech, where you can only re-play audio content already generated, but you cannot render new content.

The Reading Mode screen shows the content of the current chapter. To navigate through it, swipe up or down. When you reach the bottom or the top of the chapter, scrolling will stop and there will be a visible indicator that you reached the limit. If you keep dragging, the title of the next or previous chapter will show up in grey and as you keep dragging past the flip threshold, it will turn blue. If you lift your finger as the title is blue, it will flip to that chapter. You can also navigate to a different chapter using the Table Of Contents.

In Reading mode, you can jump to any arbitrary sentence and have the app speak from there. Just click or long click on the sentence and a context menu will appear. The paragraph you clicked will be highlighted using a gray background color. The first entry in the Context Menu says “Read From Here” and you can click it to have the app speak from the highlighted paragraph.

Whenever you move into the Reading Mode screen, the text will scroll to bring the last read position into view. You can disable this feature from Settings. The current last read position has a bright background color.

Evie remembers the last paragraph it was reading. Whenever you start the app, it will try to display the last book you had open, and it will scroll to the last sentence it read out loud.

Whenever you click the Floating Play Button, Evie will speak again the last sentence it was reading when you stopped.

As speaking progresses, the screen will scroll to bring the current sentence into view. If you don’t want that, you can always disabled the auto-scroll from the Context Menu or from Settings.

Scrolling is also temporarily stopped while the context menu is visible.

When in Reading Mode, a click on the text brings up a Context Menu. While the menu is displayed, scrolling is temporarily disabled. The menu allows you to jump to an arbitrary sentence in the text. The sentence you clicked is highlighted. If you select the menu entry Read From Here, reading will begin from the highlighted sentence.

When reading PDF files, you have the option to display each page either in Text Re-flow mode or in Page Layout mode. Page Layout will display the original PDF page, so its more suitable for images, tables, and visual reading. In Text Re-flow mode, Evie just displays the text extracted from the page, and will be able to highlight the verbalised sentence. This mode is better suited for voice reading and also reading on small screens, as the text will wrap at the screen width and fit your device orientation. It does not display the images, tables and other formatting elements.

Not all PDFs contain text, some of them only have scanned images and Evie will not be able to extract the text from them. Also, some PDFs do not have proper character mapping tables for non-latin alphabets, so text will not be extracted correctly even though in page layout mode the glyphs are displayed correctly. That is a problem with the PDF file.

When you swipe to the Sleep Mode screen, Evie will start speaking out loud and at the same time start a countdown timer. Not right away, it will wait a few seconds, just to give you a chance to change your mind before your device becomes noisy.

You can still always adjust the time even after the timer has started. When the entire time has passed and the timer reached zero, speaking will stop.

Evie remembers the time you selected and will always start from there every time you move into this screen.

The Sleep Timer is only active as long as you stay on that screen. If you swipe to any other screen, the timer, and speaking, will stop. If you want the sleep timer to remain set, toggle the switch that says Sleep Timer Always On.

You can also control the sleep mode from Evie’s widget in the Notification Drawer. When the sleep button is highlighted red in the widget, it means the timer is on.

After the timer has run out, and speaking stopped, the timer resets to the original value. At that point, if you click any hardware play button, like the one on your wired phones, the timer and speaking will start again and will stop after another interval.

Learn mode can help you memorize a text for an exam or learn a foreign language.

In Learn Mode, you can instruct Evie to repeat each sentence multiple time, and, optionally, also wait for you to repeat.
If you check the checkbox called “Wait for me to repeat” Evie will make a pause one and a half times longer than it took the engine to read the last sentence.

The Rewind and Fast Forward buttons in the notification are moving back and forward by one sentence.

The screen allows you to select the Speech engine, Language and Voice for the current book.

The Language was already detected from the book or document you are reading. If the detection is not correct, you can choose another language manually.
If you don’t see your language there, it means it is not supported by that speech engine. Select a different engine, or get one from the Play Store.

When you change the language, the list of available voices changes accordingly so you can select the preferred voice for each language. Evie remembers the Language and Voice selection for each book and it will automatically switch to it when you resume reading the book.

Here you can also change the narration speed by adjusting the Speech Rate. A value of 200% means twice as fast as 100%. A value of 50% means half as fast. Each engine has different minimum and maximum supported rates.

Evie allows you to tweak the amount of time the Speech Engine pauses in punctuation marks in sentence and between sentences. Not all TTS engines support this feature. Keep in mind that the pause between sentences may be long than what you select here, as explain the Text To Speech page on this website.

The screen allows you navigate between bookmarks, edit and export them.

Evie automatically remember the last 10 moments when you started a Sleep Timer.
The Sleep Bookmarks are only saved when a sleep timer runs to the end. If you manually stop the narration, it will not be saved.
The Bookmarks screen allows you to return quickly to the position where the timer started to help you find the last thing you remember before falling asleep.

A bookmark in Evie has two roles.
On one hand it allows you to mark a specific place in the text so you can go back there quickly.
On the other, it allows you to add your own notes relative to that point in the document.Bookmarks can be categorized using colors. There’s no predefined meaning attached to the colors. Use the colors as you see fit.

All bookmarks and their notes can be exported so you can use them outside of Evie. A simple example would be to send them over email, so you can use them, for example, when writing a review on some book you read.

When you remove a book or document from the Reading List, any saved bookmarks and notes will be deleted.

The Pronunciation editor allows you to teak the way that the text is pronounced or even to silence out text. You can replace multiple words if you want or even entire sentences. You can optionally use regex to match the text to be replaced, and you can optionally use IPA to specify how the replacement should sound.

The pronunciation replacements are applied within each sentence of your document. Click around the document to see how Evie splits the text into sentences. The part of the text that highlighted when you click is the unit that Evie feeds into the Speech Engine. We’re going to call that a “sentence” even though it may not be a full sentence, technically.
If the text does not end with a sentence mark, then the next new-line character is considered as sentence terminator.
If some sentences are very long, Evie will break them up to keep each one under 3000 characters.
Evie will always split the text into sentences the same way, every time you open the book.

When reading, Evie applies all pronunciation replacements to each sentence before it reads it out loud.
Keep the number of replacements relatively low, to avoid speech delays caused by applying replacements.

The speech engines may make mistakes, especially with foreign words or person names.
Using the Pronunciation Editor allows you to change the way a part of text sounds.
There’s no recipe for that, as it will depend on the Language of the text and the Speech Engine you use.

Sometimes it may be possible to use regular alphabet letters to specify the replacement, but not always.
For example, the name “Iosif” in English may be mispronounced, but replacing it with “Yoseef” may get you close enough to the correct pronunciation.

In other, more complex, cases, you may want to use the IPA alphabet to specify the correct pronunciation. This web page will offer some help. For example the name “Iosif” may be represented as “ɪ̆osif” using IPA.

When applying replacements without regex, Evie does Case Insensitive matching (Both “Iosif” and “iosif” will match).

Also, remember that matching does not consider word boundaries.
The sequence “ball” will match the full word in the text “The ball is red” but it will also match the part of the word ballroom in th text “Walked into the ballroom”.
If you want to only replace occurrences that represent full words, you need to use Regex expressions (see below).

If your document contains repetitive text, that you don’t want to have narrated, you can use the Pronunciation Editor to silence it out.
That’s as easy as leaving the “New Pronunciation” text box empty.
You can silence individual words, or entire sentences.

For example, say you are reading a PDF document that repeats some text at the top of each page.
PDF files don’t have the concept of Headers and Footers, so it is impossible for Evie to detect which text should or should not be narrated.
You could define a replacement with where the “Original” text box contains the repeated text and the “New Pronunciation” text box is empty.
Some more advanced use cases will require the use of Regex expressions.

Using Regex expressions in the pronunciation Editor allows you to specify complex rules for which text should be replaced.
That means the expressions should be used in the “Original” text box, not in “New Pronunciation”.

This website offers great tools for testing your Regex expressions: Regular Expressions 101.
Remember Evie uses the Java regex flavor, it is case sensitive, and replaces all occurrences inside the sentence.

Here are a few useful examples of regex expressions that you may want to use:

• Full words
  You can use the word boundary matcher “\b” to tell Evie to replace a sequence of letters only if they are not part of a longer word.
  Use \bword\b to make sure the word is only replaced if it is not part of a longer word.
  The “\b” matches any word boundary, like spaces, punctuation marks, quotes, and so on.
  You can also use “\b” to match text that starts with some sequence: “\btext”, or ends with some sequence “text\b”.

• Case insensitive
  Regex expression matching is case sensitive by default, so “Ball” will not match “ball” when regex is enabled.
  To force matching to be case insensitive you can use “(?i)” in front of the “Original” text.
• Text with numbers
  Some documents may repeat some text containing changing numbers at the top or bottom of each page.
  For example, imagine a header containing the text “Page ” followed by the page number: “Page 35” then “Page 36”, so on.
  You can replace all occurrences with just one regex containing a matcher for the number: “Page \d+”, where “\d+” means “any sequence of one or more digits”.

• Text at the start or end of sentence
  Consider the same scenario as above, where you want to get rid of the header saying “Page 123” on every page.
  What if the text “page 123” happens to also legitimately come up in the body of some pages?
  You can make sure it will only be replaced if it sits by itself in a sentence.
  You can use the specifier “^” for the beginning of the sentence and “$” for the ending.
  The expression “^Page \d+$” matches a sentence that starts with the word Page and it ends with a number of at least one digit.

Test these ideas at regex101.com to see how they work.