Features
Built for the revision pass.
Echo is the first manuscript app built around your ears, not just your eyes. Here's everything that's in the box.
Natural narration
Open any manuscript and press play. Echo reads your text aloud sentence by sentence, highlighting the current paragraph so your eye can follow if it wants to — or look away if it doesn't. Skip 30 seconds, jump chapters, slow it down for line edits or speed it up to feel the pacing.
Three voice tiers
System voice
Free. Uses your phone's built-in TTS. Fast, offline, perfectly fine for a quick listen.
ElevenLabs
Studio-quality narration. Bring your own ElevenLabs API key, pick from their full voice library, and your manuscript suddenly sounds like an audiobook.
Kokoro
A growing roster of natural voices via Kokoro. Self-hosted, on-the-fly synthesis with a simple API key.
Anchored notes
Every note remembers the paragraph it was made on. Tap a note in the Notes tab and you're dropped right into that passage of the manuscript, ready to fix it. No more "I had a thought somewhere around chapter four."
- Type a note or dictate it by voice — both end up side-by-side.
- Mark notes open, accepted, or rejected as you work through them.
- Filter by status, kind, or chapter. Search across every note you've ever made.
Voice notes with optional auto-stop
Tap the mic and start talking. Your speech is transcribed automatically and saved as a note anchored to the paragraph you were on. There's also an optional auto-stop timer — pick a duration (15s, 30s, 60s, 90s, 2min, or your own) and the recording ends and saves itself. A shrinking ring around the mic shows the time you've got left.
Car Mode
Hands-free, glance-friendly. Big play/pause, big skip buttons, big mic. Designed for commutes, dog walks, and treadmill sessions where you can't or shouldn't be staring at a screen. Capture notes by voice, drop bookmarks with a tap, and pick up exactly where you left off.
AI editing assistant
Tap the AI button next to any paragraph and ask for what you want: tighten it, soften the dialogue tag, kill the adverbs, rewrite in present tense. Echo proposes a draft. You accept, reject, or tweak it before applying.
- Default models route through the included Rork gateway — no setup needed.
- Premium subscribers can bring their own OpenRouter key and choose from a curated list of writing-grade models (Claude Opus / Sonnet, GPT, Gemini, Llama, and more).
Redundancy detector
One-tap scan that surfaces words and phrases you've leaned on too heavily. Each item is colored by severity (red, orange, yellow, green) so you know what to attack first. Step through every occurrence, see it in context, and pick from AI-generated alternatives — or just edit the passage in place.
Find & replace
Manuscript-wide. Case-sensitive and whole-word toggles for precision. Every match shows context before you swap, so you never accidentally turn "their" into "there" inside a quoted dialogue.
Search across everything
One search box covers manuscripts, chapters, paragraphs, and notes. Tap a result and you jump straight to it — even if it lives buried five chapters deep in a different book.
Metadata & AI-generated covers
Every manuscript has a clean details editor: title, subtitle, author, genre, status (Draft / Review / Final / Published), description, cover image. Tap the cover preview and either upload your own art or have the AI generate a cover from your title and genre. Don't love it? Try again until you do.
Export, your way
Export the manuscript itself as plain text, Markdown, or a Word .docx file — pick which chapters, choose your edited version or the original imported text. Export notes as Markdown, JSON, CSV, or an annotated text file with each note printed alongside its passage. Filter by status, kind, or chapter. Copy to clipboard or share through the system share sheet.
Dropbox backup & versioned restore
Connect your Dropbox once. Tap "Back up all" to push every book in your library off-device. Echo keeps a version history per manuscript, so if you ever need to roll back to last Tuesday's draft you can.
Themes & accents
Pick a dark or light scheme and an accent color (amber, terracotta, road yellow, forest, ocean, lavender, rose). Echo follows your taste, not the other way around.
Privacy, by default
Your manuscripts and notes live on your device. The only data that leaves is what you explicitly send — an AI rewrite request, a TTS synthesis, a Dropbox backup. Nothing is mined; nothing is stored on Echo's servers. Read the full privacy policy.