Local Narrator vs Readarium

Your books, read aloud — privately, on your iPhone. Local Narrator turns any EPUB or text-based PDF in your library into a real audiobook, narrated by a warm neural voice that runs entirely on the Apple Neural Engine. Nothing leaves your device. There is no cloud. There is no account. There is nothing to opt out of. — BRING YOUR OWN BOOKS — Drop in EPUB or PDF files from the Files app, the share sheet, or AirDrop. Your books stay on your iPhone, and the audio they become stays there too. No upload, no forced sync, no backup you didn't ask for. — A REAL NEURAL NARRATOR — Local Narrator runs Kokoro-82M, a state-of-the-art on-device text-to-speech model, on the Apple Neural Engine. The voices are warm, natural, and quietly expressive. When you'd rather not download the model, Apple's built-in system voices work for free. — BILINGUAL, AND SMART ABOUT IT — English and Spanish. Local Narrator detects each book's language and picks a voice trained for it. Spanish voices are still in beta stage. — LIKE AN AUDIOBOOK SHOULD BE — • Background playback that doesn't stop when the screen sleeps • Lock-screen controls — play, pause, +30, −15, scrub • Home and Lock-screen widget with a clean amber progress ring • Sleep timer for reading yourself to sleep • Per-book reading position, automatically saved • Unlimited bookmarks • Adjustable speed from 0.5× to 3.0× • Light parchment or dark charcoal reading themes • Full Dynamic Type and VoiceOver support — PRIVATE BY DESIGN — No accounts. No telemetry. No advertising SDKs. No third-party trackers. The only network call the app ever makes is the optional, one-time download of the Kokoro voice model. After that, everything works in airplane mode. — ONE PURCHASE. YOURS FOREVER. — Free to download and try with one book and Apple's system voices. A single $4.99 in-app purchase ("Local Narrator Full Access") unlocks unlimited books, all neural voices, the full speed range, the widget, the sleep timer, and unlimited bookmarks. No subscription. Family Sharing supported. — BUILT FOR REAL iPhones — iOS 17 and newer. iPhone 15 or later (Pro version recommended), optimised for the Apple Neural Engine. A small, careful app for people who still read.

Save the whole article. Read it clean, offline, or listen. Readarium is the free, private place for everything you want to read later. Share a page from Safari and it comes back as the article alone: no ads, no pop-ups, no cookie banners, ready to read anywhere — including on a plane. THE COMPLETE ARTICLE, EVEN ON SITES YOU PAY FOR Most read-later apps re-download the page on their own and end up with the preview. Readarium saves the page exactly as Safari shows it to you. If you're signed in to Le Monde, The New York Times, Mediapart, the FT, Medium or a paid Substack, you get the whole article — and Readarium tells you when a save is only the preview, so you know to share it again from Safari. SAVE FROM ANYWHERE Share from Safari or any browser, paste a link, subscribe to RSS feeds, or drop in PDF, EPUB, Markdown, HTML, text and email files. Bringing a library over from Pocket, Instapaper, Raindrop, GoodLinks, wallabag or browser bookmarks takes a single import. READ WITHOUT DISTRACTIONS Serif, sans-serif or rounded fonts, adjustable size and spacing, light, sepia, dark and pure-black themes. Highlight passages, add notes, and find anything in your library with full-text search. READY OFFLINE Text and images stay on your device. Build a self-contained HTML or clean PDF copy of any article for the days without signal. The “Make Clean PDF” shortcut turns any web page into an ad-free PDF straight from the share sheet, and “Listen to Page” starts reading it aloud. LISTEN Play any article aloud, or send it to VocaRead for natural voices, CarPlay and background playback. YOUR NOTES, YOUR TOOLS Export articles and highlights as Markdown to Obsidian or any notes app. Reading reminders, widgets, Spotlight and Shortcuts keep what you saved within reach. PRIVATE BY DESIGN No Readarium account, no ads, no tracking. Your library lives on your devices and syncs through your private iCloud — nobody else can see it. COMPLETELY FREE Everything included, no subscription, no premium tier. Built by a solo indie developer who believes reading should be free, private and beautiful.