Reading practice

Record your child reading aloud, and get a page-by-page accuracy score.

Reading is the heart of Zen Reader. Your child reads a published book aloud; the app listens, works out what was said, lines it up against the page's text, and scores it.

Doing a reading

1. Open Reading and pick a book.
2. Use ‹ Prev and Next ›, underneath the page image, to get to the right page.
3. Start the recording. Which button that is depends on the mode — Read & check, Start recording, Start (in Read book) or Start the echo read.
4. Pause and Keep going suspend and resume; the paused time is not counted.
5. Finish with I've finished — or Stop & check in Practice page.

The result appears on this screen, under the page, once the recording has been checked. It is saved at the same time, so you can come back to it later from the Reading portfolio. After a whole-book take or an echo read, See the full report opens the full report for that whole pass. (After an echo read it is not offered when none of the pages reached us yet — for example because you were offline; they are saved on the device and sent up later.)

The four modes

The mode switch sits above the page.

Read page is the default: read one page, stop, see the score. It is the mode that counts.

Practice page is the same thing with nothing at stake — listen to the page, read along, tap Read & check to see how it went. Nothing is saved, so your child can read it as many times as they like without it reaching any report.

Read book records continuously while your child works through the book, turning pages as they go, and scores each page afterwards. It ends with a page-by-page card — "You read 9 of 12 pages" — and a per-page status, so a page that was skipped or could not be saved says so rather than quietly counting as nought.

Occasionally the speech-to-text stops listening part-way through a long recording, so later pages have nothing heard on them. From version 1.305 the app notices — Only 3 of the 12 pages you turned to could be heard in this recording — saves the pages it did hear, and keeps the recording on this device instead of throwing it away. It then shows as A recording is waiting (see below); Import it checks the pages that were missed and adds them to the same reading, so the report shows one reading, not two, and the pages saved the first time are listed as Saved earlier with their scores.

Echo read is for a child who cannot yet hold a whole line. The app reads a unit aloud, waits, and your child says it back — and unlike the Book Editor's echo, this one is recorded and scored. Choose the unit under Read back:

• One word at a time — a single Chinese character or English word.
• One line at a time — the next rung up, and the default.

Extra time to say it back adds a pause on top of the time the app already leaves, which is roughly as long as the phrase took to read.

The natural progression is word → line → an ordinary cold read. Echo readings are labelled as such everywhere they appear, and are kept out of the ordinary progress averages and badges, so practising this way never flatters or dents the real numbers. The read-aloud half of an Oral Practice exam run is treated the same way: it is scored like any reading and labelled Oral practice read-aloud, but it is not counted in the reading trend.

While echo is running you can optionally show Pinyin and English under the text. These are deliberately unavailable during a normal scored read — showing the pinyin would undermine the very thing the score is measuring.

They caption the bit the app is saying at that moment, so between one line and the next there is nothing to show. Turn one on before the reading starts and the space under the toggles is empty; the screen explains why — "Shown under the text while echo reads." — rather than leaving you wondering whether the switch worked.

The same applies before your child starts. With the mode set to Echo read, Listen page and Listen book read the book the way the echo will — a unit at a time, at echo pacing, with the pinyin and English captioning each unit — so what your child hears first matches what they will be asked to say back.

Is it hearing you?

A live level meter runs beside the recording controls, and it says what it can hear rather than leaving you to guess:

• We can hear you.
• We can't hear anything — the microphone may be off or covered. The recording is still going, so turning it up mid-page loses nothing.
• The recording has stopped — nothing has arrived since the last pause. Stop to keep what was read so far, then start a new recording.

Did you understand?

After a scored page read, Zen Reader may offer a short set of questions about what was just read. It is optional, it is about comprehension rather than pronunciation, and its result is reported separately — it never moves the accuracy score. The questions are written online, so they are offered only when Settings → AI features is on.

Importing a recording

Import recording takes an audio file you already have — a phone voice memo, for instance — and runs it through exactly the same pipeline. Useful when your child read to a grandparent, or when the app was not to hand. WAV, MP3, M4A, AAC and OGG all work.

Listening back

The read-aloud panel reads the book with a synthetic voice and a karaoke highlight that follows along — the whole page, or just a stretch you select by tapping its first and last character. Tapping any word plays that word alone. The voice comes from the per-language default in Settings. This is for modelling the reading — it records nothing.

Only the controls you need while it is reading stay in view: play and pause, Stop, the Listen buttons and the position bar. The less-used settings — Speed (remembered), Highlight, Loop, Echo, the button for adding a voice in another language, and the echo settings — sit under More options, which starts closed. Tap it to open them.

Turning the page while it is reading the whole book takes you to that page and carries on from there, rather than finishing the page it was on and snapping back. That is what you want when there are two blank pages to get past.

Type size — Young, Standard or Adult, with A− and A+ — sets how large the text is for the child in front of you. The level is the coarse choice; A− and A+ nudge it from there, one step smaller or up to two steps larger, and they grey out at the ends rather than wrapping round. They move the pinyin and English lines with the text, so the three stay in proportion.

The size is remembered per child, on that device. A sibling signing in on the same tablet gets their own, and a child moving to another device starts from their level's default again.

While the check is running

Checking a recording is not instant, and you do not have to sit and watch it. Zen Reader says roughly how long it expects to take and adds "You can leave this page; the check keeps running and the result is saved when it finishes." A banner tells you when it is done.

Short recordings are always checked on the device itself. A long one — a whole book — can take twenty minutes or more that way, so on Windows it is sent to be checked online instead, which takes about a minute. Settings → Speech checking → Check long recordings online turns that off; with it off, long takes are checked on the device as before. If the online check fails for any reason, Zen Reader quietly falls back to the device.

The first time you record, the app downloads the speech model it needs. Recording unlocks when that finishes; it happens once.

Sending a recording to be checked online is one of the things Settings → AI features covers, so Zen Reader asks the Family Manager's permission the first time it is needed. With it off, every recording is checked on the device instead — a little less accurate, and slower on a long take, but reading and scoring carry on working. See Settings.

A recording left unfinished

If the app closed, the battery went, or a recording was never finished, Zen Reader keeps it and offers it back: A recording is waiting, with Import it, Not now or Discard. It shows on the Reading screen, on Family activity, and as a count on the Reading menu item, so it is not lost simply because you went somewhere else.

A whole-book recording where only some pages could be heard waits in the same way, saying Part of the reading of (the book) is saved, but some pages couldn't be heard. Import it checks just those pages. Discard deletes the recording; the pages already saved are kept, but the missed ones will not be checked.

Reading without a connection

A book your child has opened before can be read again with no connection at all — on a phone, a tablet, a Mac or a PC. Zen Reader keeps a copy of the book's text and its page pictures on the device, and the listening happens on the device too, so a reading can be done and marked on a plane, in a car, or anywhere the signal has gone.

Two things are worth knowing:

• Open the book once while you are online first. That is when the pages are copied to the device. A book that has never been opened has no pictures to show.
• The extras still need a connection — Ask Jas, homework help, handwriting marking and the AI helpers in the Book Editor. They say so rather than failing quietly.

Anything recorded offline is saved on the device and sent up the next time you are online. That includes a reading taken while the connection looked fine but our server did not answer — it is kept and sent later rather than lost.

On Windows, the Chinese read-aloud voice is downloaded the first time it is used. Offline before that, read-aloud and echo reading say Read-aloud has no voice right now and stop, unless Windows has a Chinese voice of its own installed. Try again once you are back online.

Microphone permission

On a phone, a tablet or a Mac, the first time anything in Zen Reader needs to listen — a reading, a flash card, a spoken test — it explains why before your device asks. (Windows has no such question to ask.) Before we listen says what it will use: the microphone to hear what is read or said aloud, and, on an iPhone, iPad or Mac, speech recognition to check it, on the device wherever it can. Continue brings up the device's own question; Not now asks nothing and simply does not start the recording.

If permission was refused earlier, the device will not ask again, so Zen Reader says so instead of failing quietly:

• The microphone is turned off — nothing can be recorded until you turn the microphone on for Zen Reader. Open Settings takes you there; come back and try again.
• Speech recognition is turned off (iPhone, iPad and Mac) — recording still works, and the reading is still checked, just not by the device's own speech recognition. Turn it back on in Settings if you want it.

When it does not work

"No microphone" or nothing is heard. Check the app has microphone permission in the device's settings (see Microphone permission above), and that no other app is holding the microphone.

"Zen Reader can't find a microphone, so it can't record." On Windows, Zen Reader checks for a microphone before it starts recording. If there is none, the record buttons go grey rather than failing each time they are pressed. Connect one, switch it on, or make it the computer's default recording input — then press Check again on the message. That looks for the microphone afresh; nothing is recorded until it finds one.

"Reading aloud stopped part-way through." The device's voice gave up mid-page. Press play again; if it keeps happening, pick a different voice in Settings. It does not affect any recording.

The score looks far too low. Nine times out of ten the page's reference text is wrong, not the reading. Open the book in the Book Editor and compare the text against the page image.

A word is marked wrong that sounded right. Tone matters in Mandarin, and the app is strict about it. The report's "What happened, in words" list will say whether it heard a different word or the right word with the wrong tone.

"The checking service is busy." That is a queue, not a fault, and it is not your recording — the recording is safe. Try again in a few minutes.

The book cannot be checked at all. A book with no pages, or whose pages are all marked not part of the reading, says so instead of scoring nothing. So does a book too long to check in one recording.

What is kept

Each completed reading is saved with its recording, its transcript and its alignment. You can edit the recording and score it again, score it again as it is, correct a mark, share it, export it as a PDF, or delete it — all from the report.