Description of App
70+ neural voices in 8 languages. Word-level highlighting. PDF, EPUB, DOCX & DAISY support. No subscriptions, no cloud - runs entirely on your device.
Listen 2 Reader runs neural text-to-speech directly on your iPhone or iPad. No cloud services. No subscriptions. No accounts.
Most text-to-speech apps either use basic system voices or require monthly payments for cloud processing. Listen2 runs neural voice models locally on your device, giving you natural-sounding speech without ongoing costs or privacy tradeoffs.
WHAT MAKES LISTEN2 DIFFERENT
Neural Voices, Not System Voices
Listen2 uses Piper neural network models, the same technology behind professional TTS systems. Choose from over 70 voices across 8 languages — English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Hungarian, and Swedish. Download once, use forever. Every voice included with the app.
Machine Learning Word Sync
Our CTC forced alignment system uses ML to match audio to text at the word level. Watch each word highlight precisely as it's spoken — even in our first non-Latin script integration, Russian Cyrillic.
Smart Document Reading
Our PDF engine handles multi-column layouts, filters out page numbers and footnotes, and rejoins hyphenated words. AI Vision extraction handles scanned and image-based PDFs. Full support for EPUB, DOCX, and DAISY digital talking books.
True Offline Privacy
Document processing, text normalization, and speech synthesis all happen on-device. Your documents never leave your phone. No cloud uploads. No accounts. No tracking.
FEATURES
* 70+ neural voices in 8 languages
* Audition any voice with instant audio samples
* Word-by-word or sentence highlighting
* PDF, EPUB, DOCX, DAISY, Plain Text, Markdown (tag stripped) support
* Collections — organize documents like mixtapes with intros, cover art, and auto-advance playback
* Paste text directly from clipboard or say "Hey Siri, read my clipboard with Listen 2"
* 0.5x to 2.5x playback speed
* Background playback with lock screen controls
* Import from Files, links, or other apps
* Atkinson Hyperlegible and OpenDyslexic fonts
* Full VoiceOver support — line-by-line rotor navigation, explore-to-seek during playback, Magic Tap play/pause
WHO IT'S FOR
* Commuters turning drive time into learning time
* Students reviewing papers and textbooks
* Professionals handling confidential documents privately
* VoiceOver users looking for a fully accessible TTS reader
* Readers with dyslexia who benefit from audio-visual sync
* Anyone tired of TTS subscriptions
One-time purchase. 7-day free trial. No subscriptions.
Comments
TestFlight beta link
Here is the link to the TestFlight beta of this app I mentioned in the above comments.
https://testflight.apple.com/join/uRrWXCba
HarmonicaPlayers response
do you get charged for the voices if you use the testflight beta or the voices all free
TestFlight beta
Hello,
Because of the way TestFlight betas Work you should not be charged when it asks you to purchase. You can make sure of this by swiping through the screen for payment. It should say something like you won’t be charged. For the App Store version you will get a seven day free trial then if you decide you want to keep the app pay $24.99 once and you’re done forever. No charges for voices no charges for subscriptions just a one time purchase. Hope this helps clarify things.
Bookshare
What is the easiest way to get books from bookshare to read in this application?
Adding Book Share books to Listen2
Because I use multiple reading applications I often download books from the Book Share website directly then save them in my iCloud Drive when I import documents from my Files application they should pop up immediately in your recent. The developer has reached out to Book Share to ask about becoming a technology partner, but as far as I know has not received a response. In the meantime downloading books to your Files application and importing them as you were a traditional E pub or PDF file is the fastest way. this does support Daisy books it will not matter if you download them with or without images they will still import.
Some Feedback
I like the ap and think it has potential. However, listening to a document on my iPhone 15 Pro, I notice that this app makes the phone extremely hot. I assume this is from processing all of the AI for the voices. Also, when browsing voices, how about grouping them together and giving them coherent voice names? Most of the voice names make no sense. Overall, a nice beginning though.
Phone heating
I posted this in one of the forums recently and will post it here as well for the sake of argument. Unless you require highlighting while listening, switch it to sentence mode, or turn it off. This will decrease the overheating potential. My default the app uses word level highlighting. As to the voice names, those voice names are what are tied to the Piper models voices. If you use the add-on for NVDA, you will see the exact same voice names in their voice manager.
Questions and comments and answers - from Zach
HarmonicaPlayer - The app is a one time purchase of $24.99 after a 7 day trial. The individual voices are all included with that single purchase. There are no other in-app purchase — all voices are included. But, blind-harper is correct. If you have the app installed with TestFlight, you can go through with "purchasing" at the pay wall and it will NOT charge you. You have 90 days to test per build in TestFlight.
Chad - I'll follow up with Bookshare. Someone at Bookshare forwarded my request to the right person, but haven't heard back yet. But yes, blind-harper is correct that getting those book files into files is a good way to import them. If the files are pdf, epub, daisy (including zip files), or docx, you should be able to "share" those files with Listen2. But the book files are already saved to files, you can start from Listen2 and tap the plus icon in the upper right and choose "import file" and then navigate to the file from there.
sockhopsinger - Yes, the heating up is definitely a thing especially with text highlighting set to word. You have 2 machine learning models processing each text chunk real-time. Now with v1.5 (just released 2 days ago), there was a pretty good efficiency improvement and may be worth trying again. But like blind-harper mentioned, if you are not using word highlighting, set text-highlighting to either sentence or off and that will save half the processing your phone is doing. Also note that as we speak, I'm training very tiny, efficient word alignment models per language and they run on apple neural engine. So if everything goes well, I'll have current word alignment model out of the app and include these tiny efficient ones on the next release. This should make the heat problem go away altogether from my initial testing.
sockhopsinger - Also, about the voice library - I just added some extra filters. Up in the top right corner, there's a new filter button that opens a sheet that lets you choose how the voices are sorted, which voice engines are visible (piper, supertonic, system), which tier of system voices are visible, which languages are visible, as well as a search bar for searching for voices by name. I'm hoping that makes finding the voice you're looking for better. But yes, as blind-harper already mentioned, the Piper voices are just using the name straight from the piper project. I do take that as feedback about those voice names and might consider something like letting the user add a custom name for a voice.
blind-harper - thank you for fielding these questions and comments! I hadn't been getting notifications on this thread. I believe I will now that I'm leaving a comment.
-Zach
Listen2 Developer
Phone heating addressed
sockhopsinger - version 1.6.0 of Listen2 was released today and it has much better efficiency with word highlighting on. I trained super lightweight word alignment models per voice engine and language combo. I tested it on my iPhone 15 Pro Max by playing a book for over an hour and I didn't notice any excessive heat. Just wanted to mention this improvement in case anyone was concerned by the heat issue - and that it's much improved if not eliminated now.
-Zach