The Ancient Language Institute is excited to announce that Ekho, the ancient language streaming app, is now partnered with Kevilex, a digital ancient language reading and study tool.
Users can now listen to Ekho audiobooks while simultaneously reading along in the app, using the tools developed by Kevilex.
Ekho was born when we asked ourselves where we could go to find tons of high-quality Ancient Greek and Old English audio, accessible in a user-friendly format. We couldn’t find exactly what we were looking for, so we built it: Ekho was born.
Listening to literature written in an ancient language without seeing the words can be pretty hard, though. It’s fine to crack open your OCT or Loeb and read along while you listen on the app, but what if you’re on the go without a book? What if you don’t want to drop a bunch of money on a hardback? It makes sense that lots of our users have asked for a way to read along in-app while they listen.
Luckily, around the same time that we were building Ekho, Kevin Albrecht was asking himself where he could go to find Ancient Greek texts with accessible and user-friendly lexical entries and morphology information. Couldn’t lexical and morphological info appear in-line as you read, rather than open up in a new tab? He couldn’t find what he was looking for either, so he decided to build it: Kevilex was born.
In Kevilex, you can browse a library of Greek texts, start reading any text for free, and whenever you get stuck, tap a word to get its lexical entry and grammatical information and other pertinent data. Kevilex continues to add new features too, including vocabulary tracking so that you can assemble a list of the words you’ve looked up for later review, and AI-assisted sentence explanations.
Kevin is constantly uploading new Greek texts to Kevilex, and the site now contains an extensive collection from the Apostolic Fathers, Herodotus, Hesiod, Homer, the Septuagint, the New Testament, and a handful of public domain pedagogical texts. There is no better digital tool for someone doing a close read of a challenging Ancient Greek text.
As part of the Ekho-Kevilex partnership, ALI is assisting with uploading Old English texts (see here, here, and here) as well as dictionary look-up information to the platform, so that Kevilex will be just as useful a tool for Old English as it already is for Ancient Greek.
As Kevilex continues to expand its Ancient Greek and Old English library, we will link the enhanced digital ebooks on Kevilex to the relevant audiobooks on Ekho. You will be able to quickly see and click into the corresponding ebook on Kevilex for every Ekho audiobook which has a pairing.
There are also sliders on the Ekho home page and on the language-specific pages that list all the Kevilex ebooks which we have linked to Ekho audiobooks.
Unfortunately, one of the great features of Kevilex is not available to Ekho users when they are reading an ebook inside the Ekho app: user sign-in. Off of Ekho, when you are using the Kevilex site, you can sign in and track your reading and your vocabulary progress. We do not yet have a way to sign into Kevilex while reading on the Ekho app, but we are currently working on a fix. Stay tuned!
And of course, not all Ekho audiobooks have ebooks on Kevilex yet. (Nor do all Kevilex ebooks have Ekho audiobooks.) But as both platforms expand their libraries, there will be more and more options for Ancient Greek and Old English students.
Download Ekho on the App Store, on Google Play, or access it on a browser. View linked Kevilex ebooks on Ekho, or visit Kevilex directly. If you have any questions, get in touch with us at ekho@ancientlanguage.com. Be sure to follow Kevin Albrecht on X.
Ryan Hammill, is ALI’s Executive Director and Co-Founder, and runs the marketing, editorial, and business operations side of the Ancient Language Institute. He co-hosts the podcast New Humanists with Jonathan Roberts, ALI’s President and Co-Founder. Get in touch with Ryan on X.
