Text to Speech Apps for iPhone (2026): 25 Apps, Free Tiers and Real Prices

Speechify

View on the App Store

Best for: People who want a polished, well-known reader across iPhone, web, Mac, Windows and Chrome, and are happy to pay for it.

Free: 10 robotic-sounding voices and speeds up to 1.5x (Speechify pricing).

Paid: $139/yr or $29/mo on Speechify's site. In the App Store we saw annual plans at $139.99 and $159.99 and monthly plans at $11.99 and $24.99. (A month earlier the same listing also showed discounted annual plans as low as $55.99, so prices move.)

Formats: Docs, PDFs, articles, email, camera scans.

Speechify has by far the most App Store ratings on this list — more than 527,000, at a 4.7 average. It highlights each word as it's read, can clone your voice, and offers on-device AI voices on iOS for offline listening. It also offers AI tools such as document Q&A and AI-generated podcasts.

Watch out for: Most of what people know Speechify for, including natural voices and faster speeds, is in Premium.

Choose it over SayTXT if: you want premium voices, AI study tools and a library that syncs across the web and desktop. (We also keep a longer free Speechify alternative comparison.)

NaturalReader

View on the App Store

Best for: Office documents and people who want MP3 files.

Free: Unlimited use of basic voices; 20,000 characters a day with Lite voices; 4,000 characters a day with Plus and cloned voices. You don't need an account to start (NaturalReader help center).

Paid: Premium $59.99/yr, Plus $119/yr, Pro $159/yr (monthly from $9.99).

Formats: PDF, Word, PowerPoint, RTF, TXT, DRM-free EPUB and images.

NaturalReader opens the longest list of office formats here, including PowerPoint and RTF, which most of these apps leave out. It supports MP3 export, voice cloning, word-and-sentence highlighting, a dyslexia-friendly font and speeds up to 5x.

Watch out for: The free AI allowance is modest — 4,000 characters a day on the better voices is roughly a few pages. Only the basic voices work without a connection. NaturalReader's Add screen offers to add files "from local storage or cloud", but tapping it opens the standard iOS Files picker (our check, Oct 27, 2026) — so Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive appear only if you already have those apps installed, the same way they would in any other app. There's no separate cloud-account sign-in.

Choose it over SayTXT if: you need PowerPoint or RTF files, MP3 exports, or voice cloning.

ElevenReader

View on the App Store

Best for: A very large voice library — 1,000+ voices by ElevenReader's own count — plus a store of professionally narrated audiobooks.

Free: 10 hours of text-to-audio per month (ElevenReader pricing).

Paid: Ultra (unlimited) $99/yr or $11/mo; Plus $96/yr or $10/mo; one-off hour packs from $5.

Formats: PDF, docs, EPUB, article links, pasted text, and scanned text.

Built by ElevenLabs, ElevenReader offers more than 1,000 voices in 30+ languages, speeds from 0.25x to 4x, a pronunciation dictionary, bookmarks and notes, and sync across phone, tablet and web. Ultra adds offline downloads and Voice Design, which creates a custom narrator from a text description.

Watch out for: Voices are generated online, so you need a connection to make new audio. Requires iOS 18.

Choose it over SayTXT if: you want ElevenLabs voices specifically and 10 free hours a month is enough. We didn't rank these apps on how they sound, so listen to a sample first.

Voice Dream

View on the App Store

Best for: Long-time accessibility users who want every control and fully offline voices.

Free: A free trial. After that, the App Store listing says "a subscription is required to access the app."

Paid: Annual plans from $39.99 in the App Store (we saw several price points up to $89.99). Extra premium voices are $4.99 each.

Formats: PDF, Word, PowerPoint, RTF, Google Docs, DRM-free EPUB, Bookshare and DAISY books, web pages via a Safari extension.

Voice Dream includes 36 built-in iOS voices and sells 200+ premium voices from Acapela, NeoSpeech and Ivona, all of which work offline. It has on-device OCR for camera scans and scanned PDFs (Latin-alphabet languages), a pronunciation dictionary, and strong VoiceOver, Dynamic Type and braille display support.

Watch out for: There's no free tier after the trial.

Choose it over SayTXT if: you rely on Bookshare or DAISY, or you want very fine-grained reading controls.

Peech

View on the App Store

Best for: Fast listening to web articles and camera scans, with AI voices matched to the genre.

Free: About 5 minutes of listening in total — not per day (our check, version 11, Oct 27, 2026).

Paid: Weekly plans from $3.99, monthly from $14.99, annual from $69.99.

Formats: Uploaded files, pasted links, camera OCR, EPUB and Word documents, and books from other ebook apps.

Peech supports automatic language detection (it says 60+ languages), speeds up to 5x, playlists and Apple Watch. Voices are generated by a third-party AI service, so you need a connection.

Watch out for: The free allowance is a one-off five minutes, so it's a demo rather than a free tier, and version 11 now requires iOS 26.

Listen AI

View on the App Store

Best for: Turning documents into AI podcast-style audio.

Free: 2 documents (our check, Sep 18, 2026).

Paid: Weekly plans from $4.99; annual $39.99.

Formats: PDFs, docs, EPUB, web pages.

Listen AI focuses on expressive voices and can turn study material into a podcast-style episode. Pro adds camera OCR, voice cloning, audio download and export.

Watch out for: iPhone only (no iPad version listed). The App Store listing doesn't say whether it works offline.

Choose it over SayTXT if: you specifically want the podcast format.

Voice Aloud Reader

View on the App Store

Best for: A low one-time price.

Free: Only the more robotic-sounding voices (our check, Sep 18, 2026).

Paid: Pro $8.99 one-time; Pro + Premium Voices $9.99/mo; OCR packs $0.99 (100 scans) or $1.99 (800 scans).

Formats: Documents, ebooks, websites, printed pages.

Voice Aloud Reader supports 40 languages (by its own count), plus VoiceOver, large text, high contrast and reduced motion. It highlights by sentence, and Pro adds Word documents and offline voices.

Watch out for: Natural voices are a monthly add-on, and OCR is sold separately.

Speak4Me

View on the App Store

Best for: People who want one app that both reads documents and speaks for them.

Free: Almost nothing. In our check (Sep 18, 2026), tapping Play led straight to the paywall.

Paid: Weekly plans from $4.99, yearly from $29.99 (we saw yearly prices up to $59.99).

Formats: PDFs, documents, web articles, photos of printed pages, and text you type.

Speak4Me is two apps in one. As a reader it imports PDFs and documents, reads web articles, scans printed pages with the camera, highlights text in real time, skips headers and footers automatically, and exports MP3. As an AAC tool it speaks what you type, saves phrases and shares audio to messaging apps, with 20+ languages and a dyslexia-friendly font.

Watch out for: We could not test any of the reading features, because playback hit the paywall immediately — everything above comes from the App Store listing, not from our own use. Speech is generated online; saved audio plays back offline.

Speech Central

View on the App Store

Best for: Blind and low-vision users, and anyone who wants CarPlay or Apple Watch.

Free: A limited number of articles per day. Free for blind users with VoiceOver and for schools that deploy it through Apple School Manager (App Store listing).

Paid: Pro $9.99 one-time for unlimited use; the Mac version is a separate purchase.

Formats: PDF (including scanned two-column PDFs), EPUB, DOCX, PPTX, OpenOffice, HTML, TXT, RTF, Markdown, RSS feeds.

Take a photo of a page and Speech Central turns it into a scanned PDF it can read. It uses Apple's offline voices and can also connect your own OpenAI, Azure, Google Cloud or xAI keys for cloud voices. It syncs position and playlists across iPhone, iPad and Mac, exports audio, and has presets for ADHD, dyslexia and low vision.

Watch out for: The free tier caps articles per day. Cloud voices need your own API keys, and the provider bills you for what you use.

Choose it over SayTXT if: you use VoiceOver, drive with CarPlay, or want a one-time $9.99 purchase with no subscription.

Frateca

View on the App Store

Best for: Syncing your listening across iPhone, iPad and a browser extension.

Free: 20 minutes of listening a day (our check, Sep 18, 2026).

Paid: $8.99/mo. The yearly plan is listed at $44.99 in the App Store purchase list but $89.00 in the app description, so check before you subscribe.

Formats: Links, PDFs, ebooks, shared text, camera OCR.

Frateca highlights each word, plays up to 3.5x, and keeps a synced cloud library. Pro adds camera OCR, audio export and offline playback of saved audio; generating new audio always needs a connection.

Watch out for: Most extras sit behind Pro.

Paper2Audio

View on the App Store

Best for: Academic papers, textbooks and anything with equations, code or tables.

Free: 56 hours of audio generation per week, with unlimited replays and no ads, for personal use only (Paper2Audio pricing).

Paid: Plus $20/mo, or $191.99/yr, for 168 hours a week, bigger files and audio exports. Paper2Audio runs seasonal discounts, so check its pricing page before paying full price.

Formats: PDF, web pages, EPUB, DOCX, TXT, scanned documents, pasted text.

Paper2Audio stands out for how it handles difficult documents. It skips page numbers, references and similar clutter, and it describes equations, code, tables and figures in plain language instead of reading symbols one by one. Its Reader View keeps images and math in place with word highlighting, and speed goes from 0.5x to 4x in 0.05x steps.

Watch out for: Audio is generated online, so only already-generated audio plays offline. Paper2Audio's own terms reserve the free tier for personal use and say free-tier content may be used to improve its models; the paid plan excludes that. If you're reading unpublished or confidential work, that's worth knowing before you upload it.

If you mainly read papers, we go deeper into that workflow in listening to research papers.

Readwise Reader

View on the App Store

Best for: Heavy readers who save articles, newsletters and ebooks to read later and highlight.

Free: 30-day free trial, no credit card required.

Paid: From $95.90/yr or $8.99/mo in the App Store.

Formats: Web articles, email newsletters, RSS, PDFs, EPUBs, X threads.

Read-aloud is one feature inside a powerful read-it-later app. Reader's strength is highlighting and exporting to Obsidian, Notion and similar tools.

Watch out for: Text-to-speech runs online, and Readwise's own FAQ says it isn't available offline.

SayTXT

View on the App Store

Best for: Listening to anything, from PDFs and ebooks to web pages and photographed pages, for free with no limits.

Free: Everything. No subscription, no in-app purchases, no word limit and no sign-up.

Paid: Nothing to buy.

Formats: PDF, EPUB, DOCX, TXT, web pages (including a built-in browser), pasted text, camera and photo scans, OPDS catalogs.

Also on: Android and desktop Chrome.

This is our app. The three features below are described from our own product documentation rather than from an independent check — everything else in this article we verified from the App Store or by using the app. SayTXT reads your files with word-by-word highlighting and a Focus View that shows the current sentence in large text, and playback goes up to 3x. Camera OCR includes crop, rotate and reorder tools. It supports 31 voice languages with automatic language detection, and you can use Apple Personal Voice for English and Spanish text. You can also save audio from supported voices and set a sleep timer.

Read Mode rebuilds the page for a phone screen. Academic PDFs are the hardest documents to listen to, because a two- or three-column layout read straight through jumps between columns mid-sentence. Read Mode reflows the document into one column in reading order, and keeps the images, tables, equations and citations in place rather than dropping them. That makes a paper easier to follow on a phone and to hear in the right order, and the same applies to textbooks, reports and other complex layouts. Very unusual layouts can still trip it up, so it is worth checking a document you care about before a long listen.

Text Filters let you decide what gets skipped. Each filter is a switch you turn on or off: round brackets, square brackets, curly brackets, headers and footers, URLs, tables and formulas. On a research paper, switching on square brackets and headers and footers keeps the inline citation markers and the running journal header out of the narration, so you hear the argument instead of "open bracket twelve close bracket" every other sentence. On a web page, the URL filter stops long links being spelled out. Nothing is deleted from the document — the filters only change what is read aloud, and you can switch them back at any time.

You don't have to open the app to reach it. SayTXT is available from Shortcuts, Spotlight, Control Center, the Lock Screen and home-screen widgets, so it can sit one tap away instead of behind the app icon, and it can be wired into a Shortcuts automation like any other app that supports them.

Its voices run on your device, so listening works without a connection.

Watch out for: SayTXT doesn't sync your library between devices yet. You can correct scanned text while you're still scanning, but once the scan is saved as a document the text is fixed. It doesn't use Apple's built-in system voices, so languages outside its 31 aren't covered.

Choose another app if: you need cross-device sync (ElevenReader, Speechify, Frateca) or voice cloning beyond Personal Voice (NaturalReader).

On your computer: SayTXT also has a Chrome extension for desktop Chrome. It reads a whole page, a selection, or from a sentence you pick, with the same 10 voices across 31 languages and speeds up to 3x. The voice models ship inside the extension, so pages you've already loaded can be read with no connection, and page text and audio are never uploaded. It's a page reader, not a file reader: there's no PDF import and no audio export, and some protected and browser pages can't be read.

More detail on all of SayTXT's features, on listening to PDFs, EPUB books, web pages and scanned books, and on listening on a commute.

Éist

View on the App Store

Best for: Offline audiobooks from your EPUBs, plus fanfiction.

Free: Unlimited books and unlimited listening, with 3 voices. No account, no ads.

Paid: Premium $33.99/yr or $4.99/mo (7-day trial on the annual plan) for all 60+ voices and unlimited read-along.

Formats: EPUB, PDF, web articles, AO3, FanFiction.net and Royal Road links.

Éist generates speech on your device with open voice models (Kokoro, Piper and Supertonic), pre-generates audio ahead of where you're listening, and lights up each word as you hear it. It also has built-in access to Project Gutenberg, a sleep timer with end-of-chapter stop, and speeds from 0.5x to 3x. Cloud Assist, a setting of its own, decides whether Éist may prepare upcoming narration online. It offers three modes: Device only, which never sends synthesis text; Balanced; and Save battery, which needs Pro. Nothing is sent unless you opt in: switching away from Device only brings up a prompt that spells out what happens, which is more than most apps tell you. By Éist's own account, excerpts of your upcoming text go to its servers and to independent cloud providers, whose operators can access those excerpts while they are processed, and no book text or audio is kept afterwards. Cloud Assist covers the Kokoro voices and is free each day up to a limit.

Watch out for: Éist doesn't support scanned (image-only) PDFs, and read-along is capped until you pay. Keep Cloud Assist on Device only if your reading is sensitive enough that you don't want excerpts passing through anyone else's servers.

Choose it over SayTXT if: you read a lot of fanfiction.

Volume (Volume: Text to Speech Reader)

View on the App Store

Best for: A private, offline reader for books and saved web articles, with read-along.

Free: The App Store lists no in-app purchases. No account, no ads, no tracking.

Formats: EPUB, Markdown, plain text, RTF, web articles saved from the share sheet.

Volume generates speech entirely on your device with Kyutai's Pocket TTS, highlights the passage being read, and keeps generated narration so it never has to be recreated. It announces figures, tables, code and equations instead of skipping them silently, and it can export a narrated book as an M4B audiobook with chapter markers that plays in any audiobook app. Once something is saved, everything works in airplane mode.

Watch out for: Requires iOS 26, and it doesn't open PDFs. It has no ratings yet, and since version 1.3.0 the voice downloads separately after you install the app.

Morph Books

View on the App Store

Best for: Reading and listening at the same time, including RSVP speed reading.

Free: Unlimited reading and listening.

Paid: Premium $49.99/yr or $8.99/mo for the AI book assistant, cloud sync and backup.

Formats: EPUB, PDF, web articles.

Morph uses on-device voices with word-level highlighting, a whisper voice for bedtime, RSVP (one-word-at-a-time) speed reading paired with audio, and a public-domain classics library.

Watch out for: The App Store listing doesn't mention scanning or Word files. The last update was May 2026.

Choose it over SayTXT if: you want RSVP speed reading.

OpenVox Reader

View on the App Store

Best for: Offline voices with a one-time purchase.

Free: 15 minutes a day (our check, Sep 18, 2026).

Paid: Pro $14.99 one-time (lifetime).

Formats: Ebooks, PDFs, documents, links, printed-page scans.

OpenVox offers 200+ downloadable voices in 30+ languages that work offline, custom voices built from a short sample in English, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, sentence bookmarks, in-document search, and iCloud library sync between iPhone and iPad. Speed goes up to 2.5x. Reading uses the Supertonic engine; custom voices use Pocket TTS.

Watch out for: It's very new, with only a few App Store ratings.

NaturalLocalReader

View on the App Store

Best for: Offline English and Chinese listening, including in your own cloned voice.

Free: A 7-day trial. The listing says full features require a subscription or one-time purchase.

Paid: $1.99/mo, $9.99/yr or $15.99 lifetime.

Formats: TXT, EPUB, PDF, Markdown, HTML, Safari articles.

It uses Pocket TTS for English and MOSS for Chinese, both on-device, and both can clone your voice from a short recording. If you add your own Gemini API key, it can give each character in a story a different voice.

Watch out for: Requires iOS 18.6, with only a few App Store ratings.

Ghost Reader Live

View on the App Store

Best for: A small, offline reader with MP3 export.

Free: 30 minutes of narration a day.

Paid: $1.99/mo or $19.99 lifetime.

Formats: PDF, EPUB, web pages, Markdown.

Ghost Reader Live uses Kokoro voices on-device (with Pocket TTS in beta), highlights the current sentence with auto-scroll, and exports narration as MP3. Version 3.0 redesigned the player and added imports from Standard Ebooks.

Watch out for: Needs an iPhone 12 or newer, with only a few App Store ratings.

Readest

View on the App Store

Best for: Serious ebook readers who want an open-source reader on every platform.

Free: Read-aloud with your device's system voices, plus a limited amount of AI read-aloud (Readest pricing).

Paid: Plus $49.99/yr or $4.99/mo (unlimited AI read-aloud hours), Pro $99.99/yr, plus optional cloud storage.

Formats: EPUB, PDF, MOBI, AZW3, FB2, CBZ, TXT, Markdown, OPDS catalogs and Calibre.

Readest is open source and runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Windows, Linux, Android and the web. It has CarPlay controls, a pronunciation dictionary, automatic voice switching by language, and sync through iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive or WebDAV.

Watch out for: The natural AI voices are online (Microsoft Edge TTS) and need a paid plan for unlimited listening.

Choose it over SayTXT if: reading, annotating and syncing ebooks matter more to you than listening.

Text to Speech!

View on the App Store

A simple type-to-speak tool with more than 33,000 ratings. It uses Apple's built-in system voices, which work completely offline. It highlights words as they're spoken, saves phrases in folders, exports audio, can play speech into phone calls, and supports Personal Voice. Free with ads; $9.99 one-time to remove them.

Compared with iOS Live Speech: Live Speech is free, built in, supports saved phrases and Personal Voice, and works on FaceTime calls. Try it before paying for an app.

If you need a stand-in voice for a while, we wrote about using a text-to-speech app as a temporary voice.

ElevenLabs

View on the App Store

ElevenLabs' own app for generating speech, with 70+ languages and export to audio files. You can also use voice clones you've made on the ElevenLabs website. Free: 10,000 credits a month (about 10,000 characters with the Multilingual v2 model, per ElevenLabs pricing). In the app, Creator costs $22/mo or $219/yr, and credit packs start at $6. Instant voice cloning starts on the $6/mo Starter plan on ElevenLabs' website. To read long documents, the same company's ElevenReader (above) is the better fit.

Narrator's Voice

View on the App Store

A voiceover app with ElevenLabs voices, instant voice cloning, pauses, background music and sound effects, and export to MP3 or MP4. Free with ads; $4.99/week or $59.99/yr, $9.99 to remove ads (the listing doesn't state whether that one recurs), and credit packs.

ToBe SAID

View on the App Store

A free, on-device speech engine with 4 voices across 19 languages. Voices work system-wide, and after a one-time download they work offline. There are no ads and no in-app purchases. It can also clone a voice from a 15-second audio file, but in the free app the clone is a preview that stays inside the app.

ToBe SAID Pro

View on the App Store

The same voices and engine, as a $9.99 paid app with no in-app purchases. What it adds is an unlimited voice library: save as many cloned voices as you like and use them in any app that reads with system voices.

Worth knowing: these voices only show up in apps that use Apple's system voices. Apps with their own built-in voice engines won't list them.