OpenVox Reader vs Lector

Turn Reading Time into Listening Time OpenVox Reader transforms books, PDFs, documents, web links and text into natural-sounding audio, so you can keep reading while commuting, walking, exercising, resting or working. Import your content, choose from hundreds of voices, create your own custom voice, and listen at your preferred speed without sending your private documents to an online speech service. Listen to Almost Anything Bring all your reading into one simple library: • Import ebooks and PDFs • Add documents and text files • Save web links for listening • Scan printed pages • Paste or type text directly • Organize everything in one place OpenVox Reader can generate and play speech locally on your device, so once the required voices are downloaded, you can listen without an internet connection. Natural Voices You’ll Enjoy Choose from more than 200 voices across 30+ languages and find the voice that best suits your book, article or document. You can also create custom voices for English, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish from a short voice sample using Pocket TTS and listen to your content in a voice you choose. Listen at Your Own Pace Adjust playback from 0.5x all the way to 2.5x with smooth, pitch-preserving audio. Choose convenient presets including: • 0.5x • 1.0x • 1.5x • 2.0x • 2.5x Faster playback is supported with optimized buffering and accurate elapsed and remaining-time calculations. Save Important Sentences Found something worth coming back to? Bookmark the sentence you are currently reading and access it anytime from Saved Sentences. You can: • Save or remove sentences instantly • Browse all saved passages • Filter your saved sentences • Jump directly back to the original location • Delete bookmarks you no longer need Search Inside Your Documents Quickly find words, phrases or sections without scrolling through an entire book or document. Search in Document provides result previews and lets you jump directly to each matching location. EPUB search is optimized chapter by chapter to keep memory usage efficient even with larger books. Listen Without an Internet Connection Keep listening on flights, trains, commutes or anywhere without reliable internet access. Speech generation happens locally, allowing downloaded voices and imported content to remain available when you need them. Private by Design Your documents are processed locally for speech generation rather than being uploaded to a cloud TTS service. OpenVox Reader is built for people who want convenient AI-powered reading while keeping control of their content. Track Your Reading Journey See how much you have actually listened and keep your reading momentum going with: • Listening time • Daily and weekly progress • Reading streaks • Recently opened content • Personal listening statistics Reading time is calculated from audio that was actually spoken, giving you a accurate picture of your listening activity. Made for iPhone and iPad Use OpenVox Reader across iPhone and iPad with iCloud sync for your library. Your content stays organized across your Apple devices, and one purchase unlocks the app on both iPhone and iPad. Read More, Even When You’re Offline Whether you’re travelling, exercising, relaxing, commuting or getting work done, OpenVox Reader helps turn spare moments into meaningful reading time. Download OpenVox Reader and start listening to your reading today.

Lector turns your documents into speech, spoken by your iPhone, on your iPhone. Import a PDF, an EPUB, a Word document, RTF, Markdown, or plain text — or share an article straight from Safari — press play, and listen while your hands and eyes are busy: while you work, while you drive, while you walk the dog, while dinner cooks. The name is Latin for reader. For two thousand years a lector has been the one who reads aloud so that others can attend to what they are doing — the appointed reader in church, the monk reading to a silent refectory, the hired reader on a platform above the cigar rollers of Havana and Tampa. Lector puts that old office in your pocket. WHAT IT DOES • Reads PDF, EPUB, Word (.docx), RTF, Markdown, and plain text • Imports articles shared from Safari, and reads text you type or paste • Highlights each sentence as it speaks and scrolls the page for you • Turns a PDF's table of contents into real chapters, with a navigator to jump anywhere • Exports any document — or a single chapter — to an M4A audio file • Keeps reading in the background, with Dynamic Island and Lock Screen controls • Six Siri and Shortcuts actions: play, pause, resume, stop, next, previous • Sleep timer, speed control, voice favorites, light and dark appearance • Honors large Dynamic Type sizes throughout VOICES Lector speaks with Apple's voices, generated entirely on the device. Every voice installed on your iPhone appears in the app, grouped by language, with your favorites pinned to the top. One recommendation: download an Enhanced or Premium voice (Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → Voices). They are free, and they are markedly closer to a human reader. PRIVATE BY ARCHITECTURE No account. No analytics. No server. Documents are read and spoken on the phone and never uploaded anywhere — there is no backend to upload them to. The privacy label says Data Not Collected because that is simply true. ONE PRICE, ONCE Everything in Lector is free to use. The free library holds three imported documents at a time — delete one and the slot opens again — and typed text and shared articles never count against it. A single purchase removes the cap for good. Not per month, not per year — once. The developer was tired of apps that offered a three-day trial and then wanted a hundred and twenty dollars a year, so Lector is built the other way around: the free version is the full app, and the only thing money buys is a bigger bookshelf. Requires iOS 17 or later.