Does anyone know of a PDF reader that will read the pdf to you like an audio book?
I used ezPDF on all my other android phones but can’t seem to get it to work on the Brad 3. It’s a great app, I miss not being able to have books as pdf read to me while I drive. Does anyone have any idea how to get it to work or a substitute?
You need a text to speech machine, there is this app but it’s a bit cumbersome, you have to download the language too, SherpaTTS | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository
Maybe you can import the machine into ezpdf.
I’m pretty sure it was Sherpa I used (edit: it is actually RHVoice), in order to have voice directions on the CoMaps app (Brax3 Iodé). It’s a very robotic voice, very very vintage sounding like something from the 90s.
I haven’t tried TTS apps but I will now. Its something I use almost daily on my iPhone - an app called Voicedream - to hear online articles or PDFs. I’ll try to report back what I find.
There isn’t some default engine in degoogled phones. Another solution is to make the audiobook with some online tool or prepare it at home and load it in the phone or upload it somewhere. I imagine that the Google or Apple account would offer something like this.
In fact it runs a model from Hugginface so you download and run a better engine from there.
I downloaded Librera from Fdroid and it works with the Sherpa (edit: at the time this comment was written, I was actually using the robotic sounding RHVoice, not Sherpa) voice. As far as listening to it to hear long texts, it is not something I would use - it sounds awful. The voice directions on GPS with the Sherpa voice are OK because it is short, like: “turn right at the next light, then proceed to Broadway”, but listening to a news article is tough. Maybe there are better speech engines.
It’s so much effort using degoogled phones, I wish there were more sources for complete solutions to things like this.
It’s until someone is frustrated enough to make a complete solution. You can run local AI through Termux so it’s just a matter of interface. I’ll have a look into this.
Try engines from Aurora, I tried the Google one but it throws an unexpected error probably due to missing Google Services.
Look here how to set up Ollama, Running Ollama locally on Android device - My Playground
Then you could deploy the Qwen3-TTS model and you are left with how to interconnect it with the PDF viewer or anything else.
Great suggestion. The problem I had with ezPDF reader was that everything worked except the speech option. Once I download the speech engine the app had the option to use it and it began to work. Thanks for all the comments. I also like @voice which seems to work well and Librera Reader (F‑Droid), which I now have as backup. Thanks everyone
I was just going to report, I setup Sherpa TTS and it works great with Librera.
He didn’t like the voice, do you know whether Sherpa can be loaded with higher quality engines?
I think you’re referring to my complaints, and it turned out I actually had RHVoice installed and not Sherpa.
Sherpa sounds exponentially better than RHVoice.
@Jezar1 do you get any ads on Voice? Probably iodé will be able to block them but you may get some pause of silence.
Not that I’ve noticed so far. I haven’t used it that much yet, but will look out for them.
Try voice aloud reader