VoxReader
Support
An offline text-to-speech reader for iPhone. Import what you want to read; it reads it aloud with Apple's voices, entirely on the device.
Get in touch
Questions, bug reports and requests all go to one mailbox, and a person reads it.
It helps enormously to include your iPhone model, your iOS version, the app version from Settings → About, and — if a particular document or web page is involved — what it was.
Common questions
A book stops, or a sentence is skipped
If you are using one of the Online voices, a lost connection will stop a book; switch to one of Apple's own voices and it continues from where it stopped. If you are already on a system voice, send the document along with your message — a sentence that reliably stops the reader is almost always something in the text.
A web page will not import
Some sites render their text with JavaScript, and some put a bot check in front of it. VoxReader retries those automatically, but not every page can be read. Failed imports are listed in Settings → General → Failed Web Imports — send that list along with your message and the page can usually be made to work in a later version.
The voice for my language sounds wrong, or I want a better one
VoxReader reads with the voices iOS itself provides, so every language iOS supports is available. The ones installed by default are the compact versions; on recent iOS versions you can download much higher-quality Enhanced and Premium voices, free, in the iPhone's own Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → Voices. They appear in VoxReader automatically and are worth the download.
On-device neural voices were part of earlier test builds and are not in this release; they will return in a later version.
What do the "Offline" and "Online" tags in the voice picker mean?
Exactly what they say. An Offline voice runs on your iPhone and needs no connection. An Online voice synthesises the audio on someone else's server, which means the sentence being read is sent there. Online voices are never picked for you automatically — a book will not start using one because the app matched a language. See the privacy policy for what each one sends.
Do I need an account? Does it cost anything to use a voice?
There is no account in VoxReader. Every voice that runs on your device is free to use. The OpenAI voices are the one exception, and only if you switch them on and add an API key from your own OpenAI account: in that case OpenAI bills you directly for what you synthesise, and the app takes no part in it. Audio you have paid to synthesise is cached on the device, so the same passage is never billed twice.
Where do the books come from?
From public-domain catalogues — Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks and others you can add yourself. VoxReader hosts none of them; it searches and downloads from the catalogue you choose.
Playback started on its own
It should not, and that is a bug worth reporting. VoxReader deliberately refuses to start a book from anything that is not a deliberate press of play. If you have turned on Play When a Device Connects in Settings, plugging in headphones or connecting to a car is such a request — turning that switch off stops it.
Does it work in the background, and on the lock screen?
Yes. Playback continues with the screen locked and the app in the background, and the lock screen and Control Center controls — play, pause, skip — drive it as they would any audio app.
Is my reading private?
Yes. There is no account, no analytics and no tracking, and the developer operates no server that could receive anything you read. The privacy policy lists every case in which the app uses the network at all.