Aloud — Text to Speech Reader

Aloud reads articles, PDFs, EPUB books and any text you paste in a natural voice made on your iPhone. There is no subscription, no ads and no tracking, and nothing you read leaves your phone.

Share an article from any browser, open a PDF or an EPUB from Files, or paste some text. Aloud reads it sentence by sentence and keeps your place.

FOR THE READING LIST YOU NEVER GET TO
Saving articles is easy. Finding an hour to read them is harder. With Aloud you can get through them on the commute, on a walk or while doing the dishes. Turn on autoplay and it announces the next piece and keeps going.

FASTER, IF YOU LIKE
Listen at anything from 0.5× to 3× without the chipmunk sound, and turn on Shorten Pauses to trim the silence after each sentence. At 2×, a thirty-minute article fits a fifteen-minute walk.

The voices are made on your iPhone, with no server involved. That is why Aloud needs no account, doesn't meter your listening, and keeps working in airplane mode. Each voice downloads once: about 190 MB for the English voices and about 390 MB for the voice that reads the other thirty languages. After that you don't need the internet to listen.

WHAT IT READS
• Web articles: share from any browser or paste a link, and Aloud keeps just the story
• PDFs, including scanned ones, which are recognized on the device
• EPUB books without copy protection, from any chapter
• Any text you paste, from notes to your own drafts
• Your saves from Pocket or Instapaper, imported in one go

TWO LANGUAGES, AND IPHONE DUO
• Translate a piece on your iPhone and read the original and the translation side by side
• On iPhone Duo, the cover screen is a large player and the open display shows the page

READ ALONG
• The sentence being spoken is highlighted
• A rail in the margin shows the whole document. Hold it and slide to move through it
• Your place in each document is saved as you go
• Speed from 0.5× to 3×, with the time remaining adjusted to match
• A sleep timer that fades the voice out at the end
• Reader mode hides the player so you can read the page yourself
• Find in article, plus your choice of size, font, paper and column width

ON THE GO
• Keeps reading with the screen locked
• Lock Screen and AirPods controls: play, pause, skip 15 seconds
• Optional autoplay moves on to the next piece when one ends
• Two shelves, To Read and Read, sorted by date, length or title, with search across titles and sites
• An optional unread count on the app icon

FOURTEEN VOICES
Ten US and UK English voices, and four voices that read thirty more languages, all made on your iPhone. For any other language Aloud uses the system voice. Tap a voice to hear a sample.

PRIVACY
Once a voice is on your iPhone, Aloud makes no network requests to read to you. Your phone fetches articles the way a browser does, and the voice models download once from a public host. Extraction, speech, your library and your listening history stay on the device. The App Privacy label says "Data Not Collected" because the app has nowhere to send data.

ONE PURCHASE
Aloud is free to try. The free shelf holds three pieces, with every feature included. One purchase removes the limit for good. There is no subscription, and your listening is never metered.

People use Aloud for long articles, research papers, contracts, fan fiction and their own writing. If you rely on spoken text every day, we would like to hear what you need next.