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 the 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, See the full report opens the full report.

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 whole 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.

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.

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.

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 a 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. Speed is remembered; the voice comes from the per-language default in Settings. This is for modelling the reading — it records nothing.

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.

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.

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.

When it does not work

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

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.