A free, fully offline Speechify alternative for iPhone and iPad

Speechify is a broad reading service: mobile apps, a web app and browser extensions sharing one synced library, with over a thousand voices in more than sixty languages and a camera scanner for printed pages, sold as a subscription.

Sandbook is a single iPhone and iPad app with one job. It bundles Kokoro-82M — an open-weights neural TTS model, in a download of about 276 MB with all 41 voices included — and runs every sentence on the device's GPU. 41 voices in six languages, no account, no purchase, no server doing the speaking.

If you read in several languages, or across a browser and a phone with one library behind both, Speechify is the better product and this page will not argue otherwise. If you want a reader that works with no signal, costs nothing, and never sees your files, keep reading.

This is the difference everything else follows from. Speechify's voice library lives on Speechify's infrastructure: the text goes up, the audio comes back. That is how it can offer 1,000+ voices and 60+ languages without a 40 GB download. On 18 December 2025 Speechify added a set of on-device iOS voices that run locally through Apple's Core ML, so this is no longer strictly cloud-only — but the large library remains a hosted service.

Sandbook has no speech service behind it. The model file, the 41 voice embeddings and the phonemizer all ship in the app bundle, and inference runs on the GPU through Apple MLX at 24 kHz. Nothing you read is uploaded, so nothing can be metered; there is no character limit or minute quota because there is nobody to bill. The ways other free tiers do meter you are set out in five ways free text to speech stops being free.

Said plainly, because you will find out anyway:

• Languages. 60+ against Sandbook's six (US and UK English, Spanish, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Hindi).
• Voice choice. 1,000+ voices against 41.
• Everywhere else. A web app and browser extensions alongside the iOS app, with the library syncing across devices. Sandbook is an iPhone and iPad app, and your books and reading positions stay on that device.

One more gap belongs on this page even though we cannot source the other half of it. Sandbook's real-time reading pauses when the screen locks, because the speech model holds real GPU memory while it runs; only a chapter prepared ahead of time plays locked. That is its biggest single limitation against almost any reading app. No Speechify page we checked on 14 September 2026 states whether Speechify plays with the screen off, so if listening with the phone in a pocket is what decides it for you, check that your alternative supports it before you switch.

It costs nothing, permanently, with every voice included from the first launch and no character cap. It works with no connection — not "download it first and play it later", but synthesizing new text in airplane mode. It asks for no account, shows no ads and does not track you, and your books never leave the device.

And it handles PDFs unusually carefully. Sandbook rejoins the invisible line breaks a page layout leaves in the text and stitches hyphenated words back together before speaking, so a paper reads as prose rather than as a list of lines. Books get word-by-word highlighting, tap-a-paragraph-to-read, auto-advance between chapters, per-book voice and speed, and they open where you stopped. Printed pages can be scanned with the camera and read the same way.

You can hear Sandbook's voices in your browser before installing, so the switch is decided by ear rather than by a feature list.