PageEcho 1.5.6 is on the App Store. It is a small update with one new voice and two fixes, and both fixes came from people who wrote in. Here is what changed.

Kokoro Deutsch, a German voice

PageEcho now has a seventh voice engine: Kokoro Deutsch, a German-only voice built on Kokoro and tuned for long reads. Like the other engines it generates speech on the iPhone, so German books, PDFs, papers and articles can be listened to offline once the model is on the device.

  • Download it from the voice models in Settings. It is about 115 MB.
  • It has one voice and reads German only. For other languages, Supertonic and the other engines are unchanged.
  • It is free for 10 chapters each month, like Supertonic and Kokoro, and PageEcho Premium removes the limit.
  • It is marked experimental. German pronunciation is worked out on the device from a word list built from the German Wiktionary, so an unusual name or a loanword can still come out wrong.

The model file comes straight from its public repository, the same way the other downloadable voices do, and the Network Transparency screen lists that destination. Sizes and languages for every engine are in On-device text-to-speech voices on iPhone, compared.

Gemma is selectable as soon as it downloads

After downloading the optional local Gemma model, it could not be chosen as the AI or translation provider until the app was restarted; the row kept sending you back to the download screen. It is now selectable the moment the download finishes. Thank you to the reader who reported it.

VoiceOver in Settings

A review from Germany pointed out that the voice model settings were hard to get through with VoiceOver: the list did not scroll properly and it was not clear whether every option had been reached. In 1.5.6 the section headers, the Qwen3 style options and the model management cards are separate elements with named actions, so swiping moves through them one by one and scrolling follows.

What stays the same

Everything still happens on your device. Voices, translation, summaries and answers run on the iPhone, there is no account and no PageEcho server, and the Network Transparency screen lists every place the app can connect to.

The full list is in the App Store release notes. If something in this update does not behave as described here, write to us; the guides on this site are checked against each release and this one was checked against 1.5.6 on November 12, 2026.