Listen 2 Reader vs Paperback Mobile

Listen2 reads your documents aloud with natural neural voices that run entirely on your iPhone or iPad. Because nothing is sent to a server, there is nothing to sign up for and nothing to keep paying for. You can try every feature free for 7 days, then buy the app once. Most text-to-speech apps give you two options. You can use the tried and true system voices, or you can pay every month for cloud voices that read your documents on someone else's computers. Listen2 runs its voice models on your device's Neural Engine and CPU instead, so the voices sound natural and your documents stay on your phone. WHAT MAKES LISTEN2 DIFFERENT Natural voices, built in Listen2 comes with 25 Phonon voices, American and British, female and male. They are installed with the app, so you can start listening the moment you open it, even without an internet connection. Phonon reads long chapters with smooth, steady phrasing and is very efficient on your device. 13 languages Download the Supertonic engine and its 10 voices speak English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Greek, Hindi, Vietnamese, Swedish and Hungarian. More languages are on the way. Apple's system voices are available too (Download premium voices for best results). Word-by-word highlighting Listen2 matches the audio to the text with on-device machine learning, so each word lights up as it is spoken and the page scrolls along with you. If that feels busy, you can highlight whole sentences instead. Import almost anything PDF, EPUB, DOCX, DAISY, Markdown, plain text, the clipboard or a web article. Share a page from Safari and Listen2 pulls out the article text. This also works for subscription sites, as long as you are signed in to them in your browser. Smart document reading Listen2 handles multi-column layouts, skips footnote markers in PDFs and rejoins words hyphenated across lines. Scanned PDFs are read with on-device text recognition. Figure descriptions When the reading reaches a chart, diagram or photo in a PDF or EPUB, on-device AI vision describes it aloud. If the document is in another language, Apple's on-device Translation framework translates the description. Pronunciation rules Teach Listen2 how to say a name, term or abbreviation without changing the text on screen. You can hear a rule before you save it, and apply it everywhere or to one document. Highlighting stays in sync either way. Built-in rules silence footnote markers. Voice tuning Adjust how Supertonic voices sound and save your favorite settings as presets. Private by design Text processing and speech both happen on your device. Your documents never leave your phone, and Listen2 has no accounts and does not track you. FEATURES - 25 built-in Phonon voices, plus 10 Supertonic voices in 13 languages - Apple system voices, including enhanced and premium voices - Word-by-word or sentence highlighting - PDF, EPUB, DOCX, DAISY, TXT and Markdown - Figure descriptions with on-device translation (PDF and EPUB) - Collections with intros, cover art and auto-advance - Web Article Collections: turn a batch of articles into one playlist - Clipboard import and Siri Shortcuts - Playback speed from 0.5x to 2.5x - Background playback with lock screen and headphone controls - Sleep timer - Elapsed and remaining time in the reader and on the lock screen - Import from Files, links, the Share sheet or other apps - Export any document as plain text - Atkinson Hyperlegible and OpenDyslexic fonts - Full VoiceOver support with rotor navigation and Magic Tap WHO IT IS FOR - Commuters turning drive time into reading time - Students working through papers and textbooks - Professionals whose documents must stay private - VoiceOver users who want a fully accessible reader - Readers with dyslexia who benefit from seeing and hearing each word together - Anyone tired of paying for text-to-speech every month Listen2 is a one-time purchase with a 7-day free trial.

Paperback is a fast, fully accessible reader for ebooks, documents and audio books. It opens over twenty formats and speaks fifteen languages. Paperback has two ways to read a document. In text mode, you read the text with your screen reader. In read aloud mode, Paperback reads the text to you with the voice you pick in Settings, and keeps going in the background and from the lock screen. Switch between them from the More Options menu. Audio books, like DAISY, M4B, and MP3 books, play their own recording instead. The reading bar The bar at the bottom of the screen has, from left to right: • The navigation unit, such as paragraph, heading, page, or link. Swipe up or down on it to change it. • Previous, play, and next buttons. Previous and next move by the navigation unit. • The speech rate. Swipe up or down on it to change how fast Paperback reads. You can also swipe up or down on the play button to move by the navigation unit, without reaching for the previous and next buttons. If that is all you use, the Hide previous and next buttons setting takes them out of your screen reader’s way. The Swipe up moves forward setting picks which way a swipe goes. The More Options menu is where everything else lives. • Switch to TTS Mode or Switch to Text Mode: moves between read aloud mode and text mode, described above. In text mode, a Read Aloud item starts and pauses reading aloud without leaving text mode. • Table of Contents: the book’s chapters, opened at the one you’re reading. Pick one to go straight to it. Entries with chapters under them can be expanded and collapsed with VoiceOver actions. • Elements: a list of the document’s headings or links. Switch between the two with the Type picker, then pick one to go to it. • Find: type what to look for, or pick an earlier search from Search History, and choose whether to match case, match whole words only, or use a regular expression. Find Previous and Find Next jump to a match and say where it landed, and Find stays open so you can keep going. In read aloud mode, Find also shows up as a navigation unit on the reading bar, so you can step through the matches from there too. • Go To: jump to a line, a page, or a percentage through the document. Pick which with the Mode picker. • Recent Documents: every document you’ve opened, each marked as currently open, closed, or file missing. Each one has two VoiceOver actions: Remove takes it off the list, and Locate lets you find a document whose file has moved. Clear Recent Documents empties the list without deleting any documents. • Word Count: the number of words in the document. • Document Info: the title, the author, the file name, and the line and character counts. • Export: saves the document as plain text, HTML, or Markdown. • Sleep Timer: stops reading after 5, 10, 15, 30, 45, or 60 minutes, or a time of your own. Open it again while it’s running to see how long is left, or to cancel it. • Help: opens the readme. • Settings: ◦ Text to speech: the voice, speech rate, and pitch, a Play Sample button to hear them, and the pause between paragraphs. This is also where the speech dictionary is: rules that change how words are spoken, for every voice or just some. ◦ Readability: text size, line spacing, paragraph spacing, alignment, and high contrast text, as well as light and dark appearance. ◦ Behavior: whether to reopen your documents when the app starts, which way a swipe on the play button moves, and whether to hide the previous and next buttons.