Syncing sex toys with video content is well-established territory, and companies like Lovense have recently pushed into audio syncing too, a category we’ve covered in depth.
Now a French startup thinks syncing with novels is the next frontier. Ember Read is a new app that syncs the text of your electronic reading material to your connected sex toy, changing vibration intensity in relation to how steamy the written action is.
The app, available on iOS and Android in French and English, can be connected to sex toys from six brands: Satisfyer, Lovense, We-Vibe, Lelo, Svakom, and Magic Motion.
Erotic fiction is the most-borrowed category on some library platforms and a perennial bestseller list staple, so the addressable audience isn’t small. But reading is fundamentally different from watching video or listening to audio: the reader controls the pace, not the content. With a film or an audio track, the intensity arc is fixed. With a novel, a fast reader and a slow reader will hit the same passage at entirely different points in a session. Whether an automated scroll line or a manual reading-line control solves that problem, or simply creates a different kind of interruption, is a question the app’s design has to answer.
Can reading and sex toys really sync well?
“Reading is already the most immersive medium there is,” Cécile Ollivon, co-founder of Ember Read, told SEXTECHGUIDE. “Your imagination does the work no screen can. We wanted to make that physical.”
ePub ebook files that don’t have digital rights management (DRM) restrictions can be uploaded to Ember Read. This means that you can upload ebooks bought from DRM-free sellers such as Smashwords and many independent publishers, but not those bought from the likes of Amazon’s Kindle Store, Google Play Books or Apple Books.
The app’s algorithm processes the text of the uploaded ebook and creates an “intensity profile” mapped across it. This profile, a “tension curve” of sorts, triggers the relevant intensity level of your synced sextech device as you read through the ebook.
A horizontal reading line on your phone screen lets the app know which line of the text you’re reading, so it knows where on the intensity profile you should be. This line can be set to scroll downwards automatically at a pace of your choosing, or you can scroll it manually.
Ollivon said that AI is not used for the app’s text analysis. Instead, the algorithm her team developed analyzes the ebook’s lexical, syntactic and semantic content and structure, then creates an “intensity score” for each text passage, that triggers sextech device intensity levels.
“It doesn’t just match individual words,” said Ollivon. “It reads context, sentence structure, and narrative rhythm to distinguish a love scene from a fight scene or a dragon flying.”
She added: “The [intensity] scores are smoothed into a continuous tension curve that drives which vibration pattern plays – such as wave, heartbeat, pulse, stairs, random – and at what intensity. We refine the detection model regularly, synced to the app at startup, so accuracy improves over time without shipping app updates.”
Ollivon said that as well as not using AI, the algorithm engine doesn’t use cloud processing, keeping processing at device-level to improve security.
Ember Read has been designed for users to upload their own reading material, but the app does have some test stories ready to go. These have been designed as demo material rather than to function as a proper ebook library, with some of the material drafted with generative AI.
The app team said they were trying to get people to use it as a “complete reading app” rather than just a connected sex toy sync tool. The app has functions designed for engagement, such as reading statistics and streak displays, your reader profile, and an annual data summary similar to Spotify Wrapped.
Ollivon said the app is pitched as “a full ePub reader that happens to also connect to devices – not a toy controller with a reader bolted on.”
For an often intimate and private activity like reading, sextech syncing could well be a logical extension. But reading is also something you do at your own rhythm and flow, and asking someone to use a reading line, whether automated or manually controlled, could be a small logistical experiential add-on that takes you out of the moment.
Ollivon says that despite this, reading syncing with sextech has the potential to be far more intimate than video syncing. She said her app was designed to “let the story you’re reading actually be felt, without turning it into porn or video.”
She added: “The market feels ready because people increasingly want intimate experiences that are imaginative and private rather than visual and exposed.”
Anyone up for 50 Shades of Grey with added Velvo?
