Voca 1.4.0 is out. Auto-advance off now stops after the current queue item, even when finished items are removed. Automatic transitions get a soft two-note cue, and speech/highlight handover does less work in the background. Word timing on live-speech engines remains an estimate; engine-specific reports are welcome through Voca's opt-in diagnostics. Store:

Zapstore

Voca — Zapstore

The articles you saved and never got to, read aloud in your phone

APK: https://blossom.primal.net/999d762f52cf8b224685253bc25461fd39d942f70eb32cb69adaaa1a118f43cd Source:

gitworkshop - Decentralized Git

Decentralized GitHub alternative over Nostr for browsing repositories, managing issues, and collaborating on pull requests.

Release details:

Voca (npub17h…y3hpu) on Nostr

Long-form Content: voca (Voca 1.4.0: a queue that stops when you ask it to) by Voca

Voca 1.4.0: a queue that stops when you ask it to -- seen on relay.primal.net, nos.lol

Voca 1.1.1 is out. The screen and audio now stay in step more reliably, and Nostr imports are less fragile when profile lookups drag. View article →

Voca's home-screen widget renders the whole document, not a row of transport buttons. The text is laid out the way the reading page lays it out, and the spoken sentence is kept in view as the voice moves through it. Any line is tappable to read from there, so you can start in the middle of a paragraph. The queue is on the widget as well. In practice the home screen becomes the place you resume from. Glance at it, tap a line, and the voice starts where you pointed. Download Voca on Zapstore:

Zapstore

Voca — Zapstore

The articles you saved and never got to, read aloud in your phone

Swipe Voca out of recents and both the document and your position are still there when you come back, because positions live in the app's own private storage. A listening session has to survive the rest of the day. The queue can be reordered, pruned and jumped around. Bookmarks can be named, annotated and searched, so a passage worth returning to is found by name even after its chapter location fades. There is a sleep timer. Reading continues with the screen off, and play, pause and sentence skips each work from the media notification with one press. The phone stays locked while the controls stay visible. A phone call takes priority, and Voca comes back afterwards. Download Voca on Zapstore:

Zapstore

Voca — Zapstore

The articles you saved and never got to, read aloud in your phone

Amber on black with zero blue for reading in the dark on an OLED panel. A true light theme for daylight. The reading page gives spoken text room to move. Text runs edge to edge and justified, with highlights painted behind the glyphs, so nothing reflows as the voice moves through a paragraph. Long documents are laid out in paragraph-aligned pieces, so a whole book scrolls as smoothly as a short note. A floating position pill appears while the page is moving; hold it and sweep through the document by feel. The page follows the voice the way a patient reader follows a narrator. It moves only when the spoken line would otherwise leave the screen, and it yields the moment your thumb takes over. Download Voca on Zapstore:

Zapstore

Voca — Zapstore

The articles you saved and never got to, read aloud in your phone

Reading aloud usually falls apart at a footnote marker. Voca gives you the choice: read it where it stands, hold it back until the end of its sentence, or skip it. The page shows exactly what will be read. Change the setting and the open document re-renders around it, so the screen and the voice never disagree about what is there. A table is announced as a table and then read a row at a time in plain sentences. Its structure survives in the spoken version. Markdown arrives as a real document with real typography: headings, quotes, three kinds of list, code, tables, links and images. The semantics survive the trip from file to page to voice. Download Voca on Zapstore:

Zapstore

Voca — Zapstore

The articles you saved and never got to, read aloud in your phone

Voca relies entirely on the speech service already installed on your phone. A packaging check blocks the build if speech assets ever turn up inside the package. It speaks with the service your phone is already configured with. That keeps the app small. On GrapheneOS with its sandboxed speech engine installed, the whole reading path stays on the device. Around the voice: a voice per queue item, adjustable speed, and pronunciation rules that fix the words your engine mangles. The rules can be case sensitive or insensitive, and you can preview them against any installed voice. Dates, clock times and dotted abbreviations are rewritten into natural speech before the schedule is built. Every rewrite changes only what is spoken. The text on screen keeps every character. Download Voca on Zapstore:

Zapstore

Voca — Zapstore

The articles you saved and never got to, read aloud in your phone

Give Voca an RSS or Atom address over HTTPS, or a Nostr author, and their long-form writing lands in one inbox that brings those sources together. Entries are stored on the device as they arrive. A chapter in airplane mode reads exactly like a chapter on wifi: the text is already there, and the speech comes from the engine your phone already has. Feeds and Nostr authors share that inbox, so a blog you have followed for years sits next to someone whose writing only ever reached you through relays. Voca fetches only when you ask. Every refresh is deliberate. Download Voca on Zapstore:

Zapstore

Voca — Zapstore

The articles you saved and never got to, read aloud in your phone

Open a Nostr link in Voca and you get the author's signed words directly. Ordinary web links with a Nostr entity buried inside them work the same way. The entity is decoded and the event is fetched from relays. Before anything is stored, Voca recomputes the event id and checks the signature, binding the words to their author. The lookup asks Voca's own relays, the write relays in the author's relay list, and any hints carried in the link you opened. That is how a note stored only on smaller relays stays reachable. Each address must be encrypted and resolve to the public internet. One lookup is capped at eight relays, keeping every link within a bounded search. Download Voca on Zapstore:

Zapstore

Voca — Zapstore

The articles you saved and never got to, read aloud in your phone

Paste a wrapped text file into most readers and the voice stops dead at the end of every line. Voca repairs hard line wraps on the way in, so a copied chat log or a wrapped file reads as continuous prose. Hand it a web address and what comes back is the article body, stripped of page chrome and interruptions. The fetch happens because you asked for it, which is also why sharing a page out of your browser gets it queued before the tab closes. After that, every route is treated identically. Same reading page, same measured highlight, same queue. An imported article and a local Markdown file land on the same reading path. Download Voca on Zapstore:

Zapstore

Voca — Zapstore

The articles you saved and never got to, read aloud in your phone

Voca 1.1.0 is out: the private listen-later reader now keeps its home-screen widget in step through rapid short sentences, long documents, manual scrolling, resizing, process restarts and app upgrades. Give Voca an article, web page, PDF, Markdown file or Nostr note and it reads it aloud in your phone's configured voice. The page follows by sentence and word, while your documents, position and bookmarks stay on the device. This release also cuts background work during speech and prevents one document's timing measurements from carrying into the next. Designed for GrapheneOS. Runs on Android 10 and newer. Free software under MIT. Repository:

gitworkshop - Decentralized Git

Decentralized GitHub alternative over Nostr for browsing repositories, managing issues, and collaborating on pull requests.

Full release story: View article →

Most read-aloud apps will happily speak a PDF's running header and page number at you. Voca strips both before the voice sees them. A sentence broken across a page break is rejoined, so the voice carries through the break as one thought. Words hyphenated at a line end are reassembled before anything is synthesized. What Voca keeps is the pagination itself, and your place in it, so the document still behaves like the PDF you opened. The repairs happen during import and normalization. The reading schedule is built from repaired sentences, so the voice and highlight work from the same clean text. Download Voca on Zapstore:

Zapstore

Voca — Zapstore

The articles you saved and never got to, read aloud in your phone

Most read-along apps guess your timing. They split the text and assign estimated word lengths, hoping the drift stays small. Voca measures. Each sentence is synthesized to audio before it plays. Its true duration and every pause inside it are captured, then the highlight rides the audio player's own clock against that measurement. Even the last sentence of a book stays as accurate as the first. Timing keeps pace through the whole chapter. The cost is honest: the word marker appears only after its timing has been measured, so a freshly opened document carries the sentence band alone for a sentence or two. Highlights are painted behind the glyphs, keeping the layout fixed while the voice moves down the page. Download Voca on Zapstore:

Zapstore

Voca — Zapstore

The articles you saved and never got to, read aloud in your phone

Voca 1.0 is out. If you can read it, Voca can say it. The stack of things you saved and never got to now has somewhere to go. Share or paste text from any app. Hand it a web page and get the article, cleared of the navigation. Open a PDF and get the words, with the running headers left behind. Open a Markdown file and get a real document. Paste a Nostr link and hear the note itself, fetched from relays and checked against its own signature. Subscribe to an RSS feed or a Nostr author and their writing turns up as something to listen to, kept on the phone so it plays in airplane mode. It reads to you and reports to nobody. Everything lives on the phone, you use it straight away without an account, and it is free of ads and analytics. It reaches the network only when you ask it to fetch something, and what you import is encrypted on the device. Then it behaves like something meant for hours: a queue you can reorder, a voice per item, bookmarks you can name and search, a sleep timer, pronunciation rules, and a home-screen widget that is a small reader in its own right. The page follows the voice and yields to your thumb. The sentence and word light up as they are spoken, timed against the audio itself. On GrapheneOS the speech engine is already there, so it reads as soon as you install it. MIT licensed, whole repository published over Nostr:

gitworkshop - Decentralized Git

Decentralized GitHub alternative over Nostr for browsing repositories, managing issues, and collaborating on pull requests.

Built for GrapheneOS, runs on Android 10 and up. Zapstore is the recommended way to install it, and the package is also attached to the release in the repository. The full story: View article → If you install it, reply with what breaks, what feels rough, or what you still cannot do.

SherpaTTS updates added some new text to speech models, so we tested which available models work best with @Voca: en_GB-alba-medium en_GB-cori-medium en_US-lessac-medium

Privacy isn’t dead. Voca proves it: zero servers, zero data harvesting. Paste a link, load a PDF, hit play. Offline freedom meets ethical design.

Imagine: Your phone reads **anything** to you while hiking, commuting, or cooking, no cell signal needed. Voca makes it real. No subscriptions, no ads, no spyware.

PDFs draining your focus? Let Voca narrate them while you walk, stretch, or close your eyes. Fully offline. No accounts. Built by privacy nerds. Help building voca by zapping the devs!

🔊 After weeks of silence, Voca v0.2.0 drops HUGE updates! ✅ PDFs load **blazing-fast** – even 500+ page docs play instantly. 🌐 Share any website with Voca, and it’ll start reading aloud *right away*. 🔖 New bookmark system tracks active reading positions across files (no more losing your spot!). 🚀 Download now on @Zapstore Future updates will refine the UI for a sleeker experience.

Airplane mode? No problem. Voca works where other apps choke. Text, web, PDF—hit play and let your ears do the work.