Paste a link, get something to listen to — spoken by your iPhone, not by a server.
The Reader turns web pages and PDFs into spoken audio. Article extraction, text recognition and speech synthesis all run entirely on your device. No account, no narration service, no cloud required.
Coming to the App Store The app is being finished. Write to sebastian@focusislandlabs.com if you want to hear about the launch.
Why another read-aloud app
Reading lists grow; free time does not. Web narration services solve that by shipping your articles to someone else's server — along with the record of what you read. And the iPhone's built-in screen reader dutifully reads the entire page: menu items, cookie notice, "you might also like".
The Reader does both differently. The article is separated from the page furniture, and everything after that happens offline on your iPhone. What you read is nobody else's business.
What the app does
The article, not the page
Navigation, ads, cookie banners, comments and footnote markers stay out. Pages that build their text with JavaScript work too — the page is fully loaded and analysed before the first sentence is spoken.
PDFs, scanned ones included
Running heads, page numbers and end-of-line hyphenation are cleaned up so the narration doesn't stumble at every page break. If the PDF has no text layer, the device's own text recognition takes over.
German and English, mixed
Language is detected per paragraph and per sentence. An English quote in the middle of a German text automatically gets the English voice — and then it carries on in German.
Listen like a podcast
Background playback, lock screen controls, speeds from 0.7× to 2.0×, sentence-by- sentence skipping. The text follows along and highlights what is being spoken, down to the individual word.
Take it with you as a file
A whole article can be rendered to an m4a file, considerably faster than real time. Share it, keep it, or drop it into your podcast app — that too happens on the device.
How it goes
- Add. Paste an address or pick a PDF from the Files app.
- Prepare. Extract the article, detect the language, split it into sentences.
- Listen. Headphones on, screen off, pick up where you left off.
- Keep. Your position is saved, and the audio can be exported.
A word about the voices
The app uses the iOS system voices because those work offline. Their default versions do sound tinny. It gets considerably better with the Premium voices Apple offers free of charge — downloaded once under Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → Voices. The Reader picks them up by itself afterwards and switches without being asked. The app shows you the way the first time.
Who it is for
For everyone whose reading list grows faster than their free time: the commute, cooking, running, ironing. For long, dense articles that are hard to sit through. And for anyone who finds reading on a screen difficult.
Privacy is not a feature
- No account, no registration, no login.
- No analytics, no tracking, no ads, no third-party SDKs.
- Speech, text recognition and language detection run offline on the iPhone.
- The app only calls the address you give it yourself — just like a browser.
- Your texts, your listening position and the generated audio never leave the device.