Text to speech on iPhone: what is built in, and when an app helps

1. Open the setting. Go to Settings, tap Accessibility, then Read & Speak. On iOS versions before 26 the same section is called Spoken Content.
2. Choose what to switch on. Speak Selection adds a Speak button when you select text. Speak Screen lets iPhone read everything on the screen.
3. Start reading. Swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen, or ask Siri to speak the screen. A small controller appears with pause, speaking rate, skip forward and back, and Speak on Touch for hearing just the passage you tap.
4. Pick a voice. Under Voices, choose Default or Enhanced Quality. An Enhanced Quality voice downloads once over Wi-Fi, and Apple notes it can be 100 MB or larger; after that it speaks with no connection.

• They work in every app. Mail, messages, a web page, a PDF open in a viewer: if an app shows the text, Speak Screen can read it.
• They cost nothing. No install, no account, no purchase and nothing counted.
• They run on the device once a voice has downloaded, and they highlight the text as it is read, with the style and colour configurable.
• They speak many languages. Whatever voices iOS offers for your language are the ones Speak Screen uses.

Speak Screen reads what an app has already put on screen. It has no library, no document importer, no EPUB or PDF pagination, no reading position kept per file and no text recognition of its own. Over an article that costs you nothing; over a 400-page book it is the whole experience. An app is worth installing when:

• you listen to whole books and want each one to open where you stopped, like an EPUB reader that reads aloud;
• you read PDFs aloud and want the broken line endings and hyphenated words of a page layout repaired before they are spoken;
• you want to scan a printed page with the camera and hear it;
• you want a different kind of voice: neural voices that run offline from the first launch.

Sandbook is a free text-to-speech app for iPhone and iPad with 41 natural voices, no subscription, no in-app purchase and no character limit. It runs the Kokoro-82M model on the device, so EPUB, PDF, web pages and scanned pages are read aloud offline, with each word highlighted as it is spoken and each book opening where you stopped. Voices need iPhone 12 or later, or an iPad with an A14 or M1 chip or later, and iOS 18.2 or later.

Two honest limits. Real-time reading pauses when the screen locks; to keep listening with the screen locked, prepare a chapter's audio ahead of time. And Sandbook speaks six languages (US and UK English, Spanish, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Hindi), where Speak Screen uses whatever voices iOS has. The Speak Screen comparison goes through the differences row by row; most people keep both.