PageVox

PageVox is an Android browser that reads web pages aloud. Open a page (or share one to the app), press play, and your device's text-to-speech engine reads the content while you listen — in the foreground or in the background with full lock-screen controls.

Features

• Read any page aloud — extracts the readable text from a web page or plain-text document and speaks it with the system TTS engine.
• Background playback — a Media3 MediaSessionService keeps reading when you leave the app, with play/pause, skip, and a progress bar in the notification and on the lock screen.
• Tap to start anywhere — tap a paragraph to begin reading from that sentence.
• Follow-along — the sentence being read is highlighted on the page and auto-scrolled into view, karaoke style. Toggle it off for audio-only.
• Reader mode — strips navigation, ads, and clutter for distraction-free reading and cleaner narration.
• Reading-position slider — a slim vertical scrubber on the screen edge to jump anywhere in the page.
• Adjustable speed — 0.8× to 2× presets, applied without interrupting playback.
• Skip by sentence — jump to the previous or next sentence.
• Text size — zoom the page in/out for comfortable reading.
• Content-aware voice — picks a TTS voice that matches the page's declared language while honoring your system default voice, or pick a specific voice in-app.
• Force dark mode — render any website or text file with a dark appearance.
• Bookmarks & history — save pages, revisit recent ones, and get address-bar autocomplete from your history.
• Quick navigation — back/forward, up-one-folder, home, and a full-width address bar.
• Share & open-with — send text or links from other apps to PageVox, or set it as a handler for http/https links.
• Resumes where you left off — the last page and reading position are restored on launch.
• Material You — dynamic color, edge-to-edge, and light/dark theming.

Tech stack

• Kotlin + Jetpack Compose with Material 3 (dynamic color / Material You)
• Media3 (media3-session, media3-exoplayer) for the media session, notification, and progress bar
• Android TextToSpeech for narration
• WebView (+ androidx.webkit for algorithmic dark rendering) for page display and the CSS Custom Highlight API
• DataStore Preferences for settings and persisted state
• jsoup for HTML parsing

Architecture

The app runs the UI and a media-session service in the same process, bridged by a small singleton.

File	Responsibility
MainActivity.kt	Compose UI and MainViewModel: address bar, WebView host, bottom controls, reader/settings/library, text extraction and sentence splitting.
PlaybackService.kt	A Media3 MediaSessionService that owns the TextToSpeech engine, speaks sentences, and drives a silent ExoPlayer track so the notification's progress bar reflects reading position.
PlaybackDataRepository.kt	In-process bridge between UI and service: the sentence list with estimated durations, page language, speech rate, and the selected voice.

How playback works: the activity extracts the page text in the WebView, splits it into sentences, and hands them to PlaybackDataRepository. It then sends a custom session command to the service, which speaks each sentence via TTS and seeks a silent audio track to that sentence's estimated start — so the system media UI shows a meaningful, scrubbable progress bar. Sentence-boundary callbacks broadcast the active index back to the UI to drive the highlight and slider.

Building

Requirements:

• Android Studio (or the Android SDK with command-line tools)
• JDK 17
• Android SDK Platform 36

git clone <repo-url>
cd PageVox
./gradlew assembleDebug

The debug APK is written to app/build/outputs/apk/debug/. Or open the project in Android Studio and run the app configuration on a device/emulator running Android 8.0 (API 26) or newer.

A working text-to-speech engine must be installed on the device. Voices and the default engine are configured in Android Settings → Accessibility → Text-to-speech output; PageVox can also override the voice in its own settings.

Permissions

• INTERNET — load web pages.
• POST_NOTIFICATIONS — show the playback notification (Android 13+).
• FOREGROUND_SERVICE, FOREGROUND_SERVICE_MEDIA_PLAYBACK — keep reading in the background.

Project status

Personal project, actively developed. Current version: 2.1.

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. You may use, modify, and distribute this software under its terms, which include an explicit patent grant. Bundled third-party libraries remain under their own licenses (Apache 2.0 and MIT).