Read Word documents aloud on iPhone, offline

There are three ways in:

1. From the Files app. Long-press a .docx, tap Share or Open With, and choose Sandbook. You can also set Sandbook as the default app for Word files, so a tap opens it straight away.
2. From any app's Share sheet. An attachment in Mail or Outlook, a file in Teams, Google Drive or Dropbox: share it to Sandbook.
3. From the library. Tap +, then Add Document, and pick the file.

The document appears in your library with its title, taken from Word's Title style, then from the document properties, then from the file name. Like every book, it shows a word count and how long it takes to hear. Tap it, press play, and the reader follows each word as it is spoken, with the current paragraph softly tinted. The file is copied into the app, so it keeps working after you move or delete the original.

A Word file holds more than the text you see, so it helps to know exactly what is spoken. Sandbook reads:

• the body text, paragraph by paragraph;
• headings, which also become chapters (see below);
• tables, one row at a time, so a row sounds like a sentence; a very long row is read cell by cell;
• numbered lists, with their numbers;
• text boxes, and the text of links.

It leaves out:

• pictures, charts and equations;
• footnotes and endnotes;
• comments;
• headers and footers;
• a table of contents that Word generated;
• deleted tracked changes and hidden text.

Bullets are not spoken, so a bulleted list reads as a run of short sentences. Macros are never run.

Paragraphs styled as Title or Heading 1 open a new chapter, so a long document arrives with a chapter list instead of one endless scroll. Use the list to jump to a section, search chapters by name, and the document remembers the paragraph where you stopped, the same way an EPUB book read aloud does.

Chapters come from Word's built-in heading styles, whatever language your copy of Word uses. A document whose headings are just bold, larger text is read as one long chapter. If that happens, apply Heading 1 to the section titles in Word and open the file again.

Most “DOCX to MP3” converters on the web work by uploading your file to a server, which is a poor fit for a contract, a thesis draft or a medical letter. Sandbook has no server. The voice model, Kokoro-82M, runs on your iPhone's GPU, so a Word document is read aloud in airplane mode and never leaves the device.

Pick any of the 41 voices and a speed from 0.5× to 2.5×; each document keeps its own voice and speed. Real-time reading pauses when the screen locks. To keep listening with the phone in your pocket, prepare the chapter for the lock screen first, and that chapter plays locked.

• An older .doc file. Save it as .docx in Word or Pages, or download it from Google Docs as a Word document, and open that copy.
• A password-protected .docx. Remove the password in Word first; Sandbook refuses encrypted files.
• Pages or PowerPoint. Export the file as a PDF or an EPUB, then open it; the PDF reader repairs broken line endings before it speaks.
• A scanned page pasted into Word as a picture. There is no text in it to read. Use Scan Pages on the paper, or From Photo on the image, and the text is recognized on your iPhone.