Articulate
A reading app. One word at a time.
Origin
I read the same passages over and over. Old letters, essays, a few paragraphs I keep coming back to. English is my second language, and at some point I realized I’d been mispronouncing words I’d read for years.
I also wanted to keep picking up harder words, and to actually practice saying them as I went.
I looked for an app that let me save words from whatever I was reading and drill the pronunciation. Nothing did, so I started building it.
Features
A quick tour of how it all works.
The reading view
Words appear one at a time, and you tap to move forward. No progress bar, no chapter counter, nothing else on the screen. Just the word in front of you.
The word pulses gently as you read, keyed to your pace, and eases off late at night when you’re winding down.
Five fonts including OpenDyslexic, six word colors, three background themes, and full light and dark mode. Everything updates live as you change it.
The library and your own texts
Nine categories to start from: stories, essays, speeches, philosophy, science, fiction, poetry, history, and wisdom. Each one is picked by hand, not scraped, and drops you straight into something worth reading.
Anything else, you bring in yourself. Paste in text, drop in a PDF, or scan a page with your camera and let the app pull the words off it. Whatever you add turns into the same kind of session: same reading view, same definitions, same word bank.
The word bank and pronunciation
Tap any word while you read to see what it means, and save the ones you want to keep. The word bank brings them back later with flashcards, spacing them out and pushing the words you haven’t seen in a while to the top.
You can also drill the pronunciation of any word you’ve saved. Record yourself saying it, and the app writes down what it heard, tells you how close you got, and lets you keep practicing.
Stack
Built on Expo↗ and React Native↗ for the mobile app. Local state runs on Zustand↗ with MMKV↗ persistence. Reads are instant, with no flicker on a cold start.
Supabase Edge↗ handles text parsing, OCR, and the OpenAI proxy. Definitions, pronunciation scoring, and Whisper transcription run through OpenAI↗. RevenueCat↗ runs subscriptions across iOS and Android.