Text Reader Narrator: listen to any text on your iPhone

What can you do with it?

Listen to text

• Type or paste text into the Reader tab and press Play; the word being spoken is highlighted and the view scrolls to keep up with it.
• Pick any voice on your device, Enhanced and Premium iOS voices included, and set speed and pitch in Speed & Pitch.
• Or skip the choosing: the Classic Voice card in the Voices tab is the flat old narrator sound, one tap away.

Bring text in

• A plain text file imports through Plain Text (.txt), a web page through Import from URL.
• Premium adds PDF Document, Word Document (.docx) and EPUB Book (.epub) import, plus Scan with Camera (OCR) for paper pages.

Keep, export and dictate

• Anything you save lands in Documents, which remembers exactly where you stopped; Continue Reading picks it back up.
• With Premium, Export bakes the Reader text into an M4A audio file for Files or AirDrop.
• The Transcribe tab works the other direction: it turns your voice into text to copy, share or save.

Quick start

1. Open the app. The Reader is the first tab you land on.
2. Type into the text area, or tap the three-dot menu and choose Paste from Clipboard.
3. Tap the voice button to open Select Voice. A dimmed voice with a cloud icon still needs downloading in iOS Settings first.
4. Tap the speed button, which shows 1.0x at normal speed, and pick a preset like Study or Fast.
5. Press Play and follow the highlighted word.

What is free and what does Premium add?

The app itself costs nothing. Free covers 5,000 characters of Reader playback a day, every voice already on your phone, speed and pitch, importing text files and web pages, the Documents library and Speech to Text. It does show ads, which pay for all of that.

Run out of characters before midnight and you can watch a short ad for +2,000 more, up to five times, which caps the day at 15,000. The count starts over at local midnight.

Premium is a weekly, monthly or yearly subscription, or a one-time lifetime buy. It drops the daily limit and the ads, and adds PDF, Word and ePub import, camera scanning, audio export and custom fonts for reading. Of those, audio export is the one most worth paying for; camera scanning sees the least use.

Privacy, offline use and permissions

There's no account to make. Your texts, where you stopped reading and your usage stats stay on the device, and uninstalling the app wipes them. Nothing syncs to a cloud.

Reading aloud, importing files, scanning and exporting all work with the phone in airplane mode, once the voice itself is downloaded. Importing a web page, Speech to Text, downloading a new voice, ads and buying Premium all need a connection.

• Camera: used only for scanning a page, and the recognition happens on the device, not a server.
• Microphone and Speech Recognition: used only in the Transcribe tab. What you say is processed by Apple's speech recognition, not the app's own servers.
• Tracking: decides only whether free-version ads are personalised. Nothing you write or read ever feeds an ad.

What it can't do

• Only iOS voices: no AI or cloud voice, no cloning, and the app can't fetch new voices itself — that happens in iOS Settings.
• In the Reader, pausing then pressing Play again restarts from the top. A document opened from Documents resumes where you left it, which is the better choice for anything long.
• A scanned PDF is a picture, not text, so it imports nothing. Kindle and Apple Books purchases are locked with DRM and won't open either.
• Exported audio is M4A, never MP3. Speech to Text only hears the live microphone, not a voice memo or an audio file sitting in Files.
• iPhone and iPad, iOS 17 or later — no Watch, no Mac, no Android, no widget, no CarPlay.