Settings

Every setting in the app, what it changes, and who is allowed to change it.

Settings is one long pane, and the list below follows it from top to bottom. Some entries are Family Manager only — they affect the whole family rather than just you. Some appear only on the platform they apply to.

Display language

The language of the app's own menus and buttons — separate from the language of the books you read. Fourteen languages, plus Match my device.

On Windows, changing it asks Restart to finish changing the language. Choose Restart now and Zen Reader closes and reopens in the new language, menus included. Choose Later and some labels stay in the old language until the next time you open the app — your choice is already saved either way. On other devices the change takes effect straight away.

Dates, numbers and percentages are written the way the display language writes them — 95 % in German, for example. Where your device's regional format is the same language (English UK on a device set to Australian English, say), the device's own date order is kept. Badges, reports and the messages that explain why something could not be done follow the display language too.

Colour theme

Ten themes, and they change the whole app rather than just the reading page:

• Match my device — follows your system's light or dark setting.
• Rice Paper, Still Water, Evening Sepia — light.
• Night Ink — dark.
• Bubblegum, Mint — light, and made for younger children.
• Deep Sea, Galaxy — dark, same idea.
• Plain Grey — light and deliberately plain, for anyone who finds the rest distracting.

The theme belongs to the device, not to a reader: everyone using that tablet sees it. For screen readers, keyboard use and text size, see Accessibility.

Account

Who you are signed in as, and Sign out. Any invitation waiting for you appears here with Review and accept.

• Manage family members and Invite family member (Family Manager) — see Your family.
• Rename family (Family Manager, Family plan) — change the family's name. See Your family.
• My readers (teacher access) — the children you have been linked to as a teacher.
• Hide other parents' names (Family Manager) — other parents appear as "Parent" rather than by name. You and the readers are always named.
• Ways to sign in — lists how you can sign in to this account (signing in with a code or password shows as Email), and lets you add Apple, Google or Microsoft to this account, so that button brings you straight back here next time. Worth doing even if the provider holds a different email address for you; see Signing in for why that matters.

Your family

Who is in the family, and their roles.

Product tier

Your plan, with links to Manage subscription and Manage devices. On Windows, Android and a Mac the first reads Manage subscription at zenreader.co and opens the website, signing you in on the way; on an iPhone or iPad it opens the plans inside the app, because Apple takes the payment there. See Your subscription and Managing your devices.

Reading reminders

(Family Manager) Off unless you turn them on. A Daily reading reminder at a time you choose, in quarter-hour steps, in your timezone — sent only to children who have not read or practised that day. Streak reminders are separate and also opt-in.

Notifications

Your own settings, not the family's — turning one off stops it reaching you.

Push notifications on my devices is the master switch, and turning it off still leaves everything on the Notifications page inside the app. Under it: Activity updates (readings and spelling), Comments about a reader, Edit suggestions, and Reminders and nudges — which also covers the new-term reminder to add the term's spelling and word lists. See Notifications.

Homework help

(Family Manager) How much should the tutor help? — Hints only, Hints first, or Explain the idea. See Homework help.

Reader profile and school marks

A short survey and a place to record termly school marks, so progress can be set against something real. Readers edit their own; a parent picks a child first. A child is never stopped at sign-in to fill it in: a notification reminds you when a new term's report-card mark is due, and you fill the child's profile in from here. Families outside Singapore also enter their school term start dates there. See Reader profile and school marks. This is personal information about a child: it is stored in your family's account and is never attached to app-usage data.

Read-aloud voices

One default voice per language, with Preview to hear it. It is used everywhere Zen Reader reads aloud in that language — books, word lists and spelling. Reading speed is not here; it is on the read-aloud controls themselves, where you can hear the effect.

Each picker sits at the left of its row with Preview beside it. A closed picker shows the voice's short name; open it to see the full one. Zen Reader includes a built-in offline Chinese voice, and any voices you install on the device appear here by themselves. On Windows the offline Chinese voice is downloaded once, the first time it is needed — you will see Downloading Chinese voice while it comes down.

Chinese OCR

(Windows, Family Manager and Parent) Install Chinese OCR pack — a one-off download that lets text recognition run on your computer without the internet, for importing books. Installing it needs administrator permission on the computer. A Reader does not see it. Until it is installed this section says The Simplified Chinese (zh-Hans) OCR language pack is not installed on this Windows device.

Speech checking

(Windows) Check long recordings online, on by default. Short recordings are always checked on your own computer. A long one — a whole book — can take twenty minutes or more that way, so it is sent to our online speech service instead and comes back in about a minute. The recording is used only to produce the transcript and is never used to train the service. Turn this off to keep all checking on the device.

App lock

A PIN, and optionally your device's fingerprint or face unlock — Windows Hello, Touch ID or Face ID, or Android biometrics. The PIN is always available as the fallback, so a failed fingerprint never locks you out. Change PIN and Turn off lock are here once it is set.

The first time an adult signs in on a device, Zen Reader offers to set this up — Add a lock to Zen Reader? A child signing in is never asked: the lock is the family's decision, and a PIN a child chose could lock the parents out.

If the fingerprint or face prompt could not be shown at all, the lock screen says Biometric unlock didn't work. Enter your PIN instead. — type the PIN. Cancelling the prompt yourself, or a finger that does not match, says nothing: the PIN box is simply there as usual.

Zen Reader always asks on a cold start. On a phone it re-asks after the app has been in the background for a few minutes — not on every glance away, because the file picker and the microphone prompt both count as leaving the app.

Sign-in password

Optional. Most accounts have no password and use the emailed one-time code. Set one here if you would rather not wait for a code; the code always keeps working either way. See Signing in.

AI features

(Family Manager) Allow AI features — off until you turn it on. Several parts of Zen Reader do their work by sending something off your device: the page your child is reading, a photograph of their handwriting, composition or homework, a recording of them reading aloud or talking in Oral Practice, or a message to Ask Jas.

Zen Reader asks the Family Manager at first sign-in, before the library appears, and names who receives what. If nobody answered then — you were invited into a family later, say, or the list of recipients has changed since — the same question appears again at the moment a feature first needs it. The recipients are:

• Anthropic (United States) — book pages, photos of homework, handwriting, compositions and marked tests, Ask Jas messages and Oral Practice conversations.
• Groq, Inc. (United States) — recordings of your child reading aloud or talking in Oral Practice.
• Google (United States) — book pages and cover images, for reading text off a page and looking a book up.
• Microsoft (Singapore and the United States) — book pages, when you choose Microsoft to read their text, and text to be spoken aloud in a cloud voice.

They process it only to give you the result. None of them use your family's content to train their models, and we never sell it or use it for advertising.

With it off the app still works, and says what it is doing instead. Reading text off a page and cloud read-aloud voices fall back to your own device — a little less accurate, and the device's own voice. Checking a recording falls back too on Windows, Mac and iPhone or iPad — but not on Android, which has no way to turn a finished recording into text without the internet. There it says so rather than pretending otherwise.

Handwriting marking, homework help, translation, book look-up, reading a marked school test, reading your child's composition back and pointing out what to look at in it, the Listening questions and Ask Jas have no on-device version at all, so they say they are unavailable rather than failing quietly. The composition ones are the furthest out of reach: nothing on any phone or laptop reads a page of a child's handwriting as free prose, and unlike a spelling sheet there is not even a list of expected words to check a local attempt against.

Only the Family Manager can change it: a child must not be able to agree to their own voice being sent. If anybody else in the family reaches a feature that needs it, they are told to ask you rather than shown an error.

Where a feature is refused because this is off — Ask Jas, for instance — it says so and offers Open settings, which brings you straight to this switch.

Turning it off here stops the sending immediately. Turning it back on does not re-show the sheet — the same disclosure sits beside the switch.

App-usage data

(Family Manager) Share anonymous app-usage data — off until you switch it on. It lets us see which features are used, so we know what to build. It is family-wide.

Zen Reader news

Send me Zen Reader news by email — off until you switch it on, and it is yours alone, not the family's. Deliberately kept apart from the setting above: agreeing to one must never mean agreeing to the other.

Deleted books

Restore a book somebody deleted, where it had reading history. See Your family library.

Delete account

Permanent. If you are the last member of your family, the family and its books go with it. Read the confirmation carefully. This is not the same as cancelling a subscription.

About

The version number and the date the build was made — quote both if you report a problem.

• Check for updates — Windows and Mac; phones update through their store.
• Share diagnostics — packages the app's log files so you can email them to support. No passwords, no book content.
• The legal links: privacy policy, terms of use, the licence agreement, refunds and cancellation, acceptable use, the disclaimer, and the third-party licences.

See About and licences.