Echo

Echo User Manual

The complete reference for Echo: Audiobook Study Player on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and widgets.

New to Echo? Read Getting the Most Out of Echo first — it explains why these features help you learn. This manual explains how everything works.

Status tags: 🚧 Coming in 1.0 = in active development right now. 🔭 Roadmap = planned after 1.0. Everything unmarked ships in the current beta.

Contents: 1. Getting Started · 2. Organizing Your Library · 3. The Three Tabs · 4. Playback · 5. Smart Rewind · 6. Loop Modes · 7. Sleep Timer · 8. Bookmarks · 9. The Study System · 10. Brain Dump & Book Notes · 11. The Reader: EPUB · 12. Audio–Text Alignment · 13. PDF Companions · 14. Insights · 15. Context Memory · 16. Exports & Your Data · 17. Playlist & Timeline · 18. Apple Watch · 19. Widgets & Control Center · 20. CarPlay · 21. Echo for Mac · 22. Sync & iCloud · 23. Settings · 24. Transcription Tools · 25. Privacy · 26. Troubleshooting & FAQ

1. Getting Started

What Echo plays

Echo is a player for DRM-free audiobooks — files you own and can see in the Files app:

Echo does not bypass DRM and cannot play protected Audible/Apple Books titles. Tools like Libation or OpenAudible can export books you own to open formats — see the FAQ (section 26).

Loading your first book

  1. Put the audiobook in a folder — one folder per book is the happy path (section 2 has the full convention). iCloud Drive, "On My iPhone," third-party file providers: all work.
  2. In Echo, choose Load Folder and select the book's folder.
  3. Echo scans the folder, builds the chapter list, finds the cover art (embedded, or a cover.* image in the folder), and picks up any EPUB or PDF sitting alongside the audio for automatic import.
  4. Press play.

Echo remembers everything per book: position, speed, loop mode, and settings overrides. Reopen the app days later and it resumes exactly where you left off — with Smart Rewind backing up just enough to restore your context.

First launch walks you through this — including a step on setting up your library folder. 🚧 Coming in 1.0

Cover art

Echo looks for artwork in this order: image embedded in the audio file → an image file in the book folder (prefers cover.*) → the Echo app icon as fallback. Artwork drives the player background, the watch complication thumbnail, and the dynamic accent color.

2. Organizing Your Library

Echo reads your files in place — there's no import-everything step and no hidden copy of your library. A little folder discipline up front pays off every single day.

The golden rule: one folder per book

iCloud Drive/
└── Audiobooks/
    ├── Thinking, Fast and Slow/
    │   ├── Thinking Fast and Slow.m4b
    │   ├── Thinking Fast and Slow.epub   ← auto-imported
    │   └── cover.jpg                     ← optional if art is embedded
    ├── Project Hail Mary/
    │   ├── 01 - Chapter 1.mp3
    │   ├── 02 - Chapter 2.mp3
    │   └── cover.png
    └── Archive/
        └── (finished books)

File naming that sorts correctly

iCloud Drive: the rules of the road

The single most important setting: long-press your Audiobooks folder in the Files app and choose Keep Downloaded. Without it, iOS silently evicts audio files to reclaim space — the file looks present with a little cloud icon, but the bytes are gone until re-downloaded. That's the #1 cause of "my book stopped playing mid-commute."

What lives where

3. The Three Tabs

A mini-player bar stays visible on the Timeline tab so transport controls are never more than one tap away.

4. Playback

Transport controls

Five configurable transport buttons. Defaults: skip back, previous chapter, play/pause, next chapter, skip forward.

Speed control — pitch-corrected

0.5× to 2×+ with true pitch correction. Set a global default; each book remembers its own speed; all displayed times adjust to the current speed, so "20 minutes left" means real minutes.

Volume boost

Up to +9 dB of clean gain (configurable), independent of system volume.

Audio behavior

5. Smart Rewind

Every time you press play after a pause, Echo rewinds first — proportionally to how long you were gone: seconds away → a few seconds back; minutes → more; hours or days → the most. All three tiers are configurable (Settings → Smart Rewind). This is Echo's signature feature. You never scrub backward hunting for the last sentence you remember.

6. Loop Modes

Loop mode is remembered per book; available on the watch and as a long-press action.

7. Sleep Timer

Set a countdown (with fade-out) or stop at chapter end. Echo notes the pause time, so tomorrow's Smart Rewind backs you up over whatever you drifted through. Start, stop, and toggle from the phone or the watch.

8. Bookmarks

Creating bookmarks

What a bookmark can hold

Voice memos that play inline

With Inline Voice Memos enabled, playback reaching a bookmark with a memo ducks the narration and plays your voice — past-you annotating the book for present-you — then resumes. Toggle globally or per book.

Photo bookmarks & dynamic artwork

As playback passes a photo bookmark, the player artwork switches to your photo (phone, watch, lock screen) and back to the cover afterward. Why bother? Your brain involuntarily memorizes where you were alongside what you heard — the photo re-triggers the passage. Full story in the learning guide.

Safety first: never take photos while driving. Pick from your library later — or let Context Memory capture the place automatically, hands-free (🚧 Coming in 1.0).

Managing bookmarks

9. The Study System (Flashcards & Review)

A complete spaced-repetition system — think Anki, built into your audiobook player, with audio on the cards. (New to spaced repetition? The learning guide explains it from zero.)

Creating cards

Every card has a front (write it as a question) and a back, and can carry an audio snippet (the actual narrated clip), a photo, a deck and tags, and a trigger timing (or manual-review-only).

The Card Inbox — mark now, card later

  1. Mark: one tap on the transport bar (or a watch button) captures the passage you just heard — a few seconds of context either side, with the transcript snippet when the book is aligned. Playback never stops.
  2. Inbox: marks collect grouped by book, with a badge on the dashboard and Timeline toolbar.
  3. Convert: tap a mark → a pre-filled card editor (adjust the clip, write the front as a question, pick a deck) — or swipe to dismiss.

The old inline flashcard popups are retired — capture no longer competes with listening.

Editing cards

Every card opens in a full editor: front/back, audio snippet range (with "use current position"), deck, tags, enabled toggle, delete-with-confirmation. Reachable from the Timeline, review sessions, and the deck browser.

Decks & tags

Importing real Anki decks (.apkg) 🚧 Coming in 1.0

Pick a .apkg file from the deck list's import button and Echo maps it card-by-card, scheduling history included — mature cards stay mature; nothing restarts from zero.

Daily Review

Review on Apple Watch

The full review session runs hands-free on the watch: hear the card, think your answer, tap a grade. Perfect for a walk.

🔭 Roadmap — Chapter Study Mode: treat each chapter as a flashcard, with due chapters lining up as a ready-made listening queue. Until then: loop the chapter, grade yourself honestly at its end, and card anything you couldn't explain.

10. Brain Dump & Book Notes 🚧 Coming in 1.0

Bookmarks pin thoughts to a moment; flashcards pin them to a question. Book Notes are for everything else — thoughts about the book as a whole, tangents worth keeping, and the "buy stamps" intrusions that would otherwise cost you a chapter.

Capturing

The Notes inbox

11. The Reader: EPUB

Drop the .epub in the book's folder (auto-import) or use Import Document. Imports are copy-only and validated; paragraphs, headings, images, inline formatting, block quotes, and links are preserved.

While the Read tab is active, the bottom toolbar switches to reader-optimized controls.

12. Audio–Text Alignment

Auto-Align (recommended)

Tap Auto-Align Chapters and Echo's on-device speech recognition (WhisperKit on the Neural Engine — no audio ever leaves your device) aligns the book in tiers:

Between anchors, Echo interpolates positions weighted by paragraph word counts. When alignment completes, Echo shows your % aligned (🚧 Coming in 1.0).

Continuous Alignment (optional, in Settings) keeps refining in the background while you listen.

Manual anchors

13. PDF Companion Documents

Import like an EPUB — the Import button accepts both and routes automatically.

14. Insights

Echo's Insights charts are computed on your device from local listening and review history. Optional Audiobookshelf progress exchange is separate and sends progress to the server you connect. Open Insights from the dashboard modules or the Timeline toolbar.

The dashboard gets live teaser modules — real listened-today, streak, upcoming reviews. The Mac gets a Stats pane with the Overview, Listening, and Study sections.

15. Context Memory (Location) 🚧 Coming in 1.0

Your brain files where alongside what — Echo can capture the "where" for you. Off by default; opt in via Settings → Privacy & Location → Context Memory.

16. Exports & Your Data

Echo's position on your data: it's yours, in formats you can read, forever. The database schema is open source; nothing is hostage.

17. The Playlist & Timeline

Playlist

Timeline

Your study history as a feed: chapters, bookmarks (with photos and memo indicators), flashcards, notes, and aligned text excerpts, in book order. The dashboard modules (due cards, streak, listened today, inbox badges) live here. Freeze the timeline while browsing so it stops following playback, then sync-and-resume when ready.

18. Apple Watch

The remote

On-wrist features

Reliability

State syncs via durable application context — the watch picks up the truth the moment it wakes, and stale commands are never replayed. If watch and phone disagree, the watch asks the phone for the authoritative position and converges.

19. Widgets & Control Center

20. CarPlay

CarPlay isn't enabled in current builds; it's on the roadmap. Until then, the watch remote and your car's audio connection do the job — Echo's whole design assumes the phone stays in your pocket.

21. Echo for Mac

Mac 1.0 is the functional core — play, read, review, see your stats. Full reader/alignment parity with iOS continues after 1.0.

22. Sync & iCloud

Core owned-file playback and reading do not require an Echo account. Files in an iCloud folder follow Apple's file services. This release does not promise complete private synchronization of flashcards, decks, bookmarks or playback position. Watch features transfer selected state and voice memos with the paired iPhone.

When network access is permitted, importing a book may look up matching public alignment anchors, with local fallback for an ordinary lookup failure. The lookup uses a deterministic record identifier derived from the book's title, author and duration; it does not publish local anchors, audio, full book text or notes. No matching record or successful request is guaranteed.

The current release does not expose public-alignment uploads. Earlier builds offered an upload of title, author, duration and alignment markers with a persistent identifier derived from the uploader's iCloud account. That payload excluded audio, full book text and notes. If an alignment was shared using another build, deleting local content or signing out does not itself delete public copies. Echo's client sets no automatic expiry and has no in-app deletion control for past shared alignments; copies obtained by others have separate handling. See the Echo Privacy Policy.

23. Settings Reference

24. Transcription Tools (Power Users)

The Echo repository ships companion CLI tools for generating full transcripts on your Mac:

Optional — the iOS app's built-in alignment needs none of this.

25. Privacy

26. Troubleshooting & FAQ

My book won't play / chapters are missing. Nine times out of ten this is iCloud eviction: the files show a cloud icon and aren't on the device. Long-press the folder in Files → Keep Downloaded (section 2). For multi-file books, confirm the files sort correctly by name — or drag-reorder in the playlist.

How should I organize my audiobook and EPUB files? One parent "Audiobooks" folder; one folder per book; the EPUB or PDF in the same folder as the audio; zero-padded track numbers. iCloud Drive for cross-device, "On My iPhone" for always-local. Section 2 has the full guide.

Can Echo play my Audible or Apple Books audiobooks? Not while they're DRM-locked — Echo plays open formats only and does not bypass DRM. If you want to listen to audiobooks you've purchased in Echo, tools exist that export your own library to open formats: Libation (free, open source, for Audible libraries) and OpenAudible (paid) are the well-known ones. Libation's M4B exports work beautifully with Echo — chapters, art, and all. One honest caveat: the legality of removing DRM from media you own varies by country, even for personal use — check the rules where you live. Echo has no affiliation with these tools, and the best long-term fix is buying DRM-free where possible (Libro.fm and Downpour offer DRM-free titles; LibriVox is free and public-domain).

Does Echo work fully offline? Local playback, reading, narration and alignment can work with the required files and models already present. Model downloads, optional community-alignment lookup, website capture, external AI and Audiobookshelf use a network connection. External AI sends book text to the configured provider. This release does not expose public-alignment uploads. See the Echo Privacy Policy.

The reader text doesn't match the narration. Different editions drift. Run Auto-Align Chapters; for stubborn spots, long-press the paragraph you're hearing → Align to Now. Two or three manual anchors usually tame even a messy book.

Auto-alignment is slow or my phone runs warm. The first run downloads the on-device speech model (~40 MB) and transcription is real Neural Engine work. Plug in for the first full-book alignment of a long book; afterward, repairs are quick.

Can I import my Anki decks? JSON decks import today. Real .apkg files — scheduling history included — arrive with 1.0 (🚧). Newest-format decks: re-export from Anki with "Support older Anki versions" checked. Cloze cards flatten to plain Q&A in v1.

Can I get my flashcards and notes back out? Yes — that's policy. Bookmarks and full study-notes bundles export to Markdown today, ready for Obsidian/Logseq/Notion. Portable JSON deck export is coming with 1.0 (🚧). The schema is open source; your data is never hostage. See section 16.

Will flashcards interrupt my listening? No. Mid-playback popups are retired: one tap marks a passage into the Card Inbox without pausing, and reviews happen in Daily Review.

What's the difference between a bookmark, a note, and a flashcard? A bookmark is a moment (timestamp, optionally with memo/photo/place). A note (🚧) is an untethered thought — the brain-dump. A flashcard is a question you want to keep answering. Notes and bookmarks both promote into flashcards — capture cheap first, decide later.

Will my flashcards and bookmarks sync between my devices? Alignment anchors sync today; full study sync — cards, decks, bookmarks, playback position — ships in 1.0 through your personal iCloud (🚧). See section 22.

The watch shows a stale book or position. Raise the watch and give it a beat — it requests authoritative state from the phone on wake. Both devices on, nearby, helps.

Is the location feature tracking me? Context Memory is optional and off by default. With permission, the device can provide a precise fix; Echo rounds coordinates before asking Apple's geocoder for a place name and stores the resulting context locally. Delete Context Memory removes the app's local context records, not providers' records or backups. See section 15 and the Echo Privacy Policy.

Does Echo use AI? Does anything leave my device? Local narration and alignment use on-device models. Optional external-AI features send book text to the provider you configure, under that provider's policies. They are separate from local processing and do not make the same retention promise. The current release does not expose public-alignment uploads; conditional lookup with local fallback remains. See the Echo Privacy Policy.

What's coming after 1.0? The honest shortlist: Chapter Study Mode, gentle hyperfocus/transition reminders, a Context Memory map view, .apkg export, CarPlay, full Mac reader parity. The roadmap is public, like everything else.

Where are my files? Can I get my data out? Your audio stays where you put it (Echo reads in place and never modifies your files). Echo's own data lives in a local database with an open-source schema; everything exports (section 16). Deleting the app deletes Echo's database — your audio folder is untouched.

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