The no-subscription Voice Dream Reader alternative for iPhone and iPad

Voice Dream Reader is a mature accessibility tool. It reads PDF, Word, PowerPoint, RTF, Google Docs, DRM-free EPUB, DAISY and Bookshare books and MP3/MP4 audiobooks; it has an OCR scanner, bookmarks, annotations, iCloud Drive sync, and — its listing says so directly — "All voices work offline and play in the background even with the screen locked.".

Its iOS listing covers iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, plus Apple Watch and Apple Vision. Mac is not on that listing: it is a separate Mac App Store app, version 2.0.2, last updated 19 May 2025. And the app is free to download only in the sense that the download costs nothing — the same listing states that a subscription is required to access it, with a free trial for new users.

Sandbook is one free iPhone and iPad app with a neural speech model inside it. 41 voices in six languages, EPUB, PDF, web pages and camera scans, word-by-word highlighting, no account, no purchases, no server doing the speaking. That is the whole surface.

This is the interesting difference, and it cuts both ways. Voice Dream's offline voices are the 36 built-in iOS system voices across 27 languages, plus 200+ licensed premium voices in 30 languages from Acapela, NeoSpeech and Ivona, bought individually at $4.99 one-off (US iOS App Store) or included with a plan. That is an enormous catalogue, covering languages Sandbook has no answer for, though those voice families are older engine designs than a modern neural model.

Sandbook runs Kokoro-82M — 82 million parameters, bundled in a download of about 276 MB with all 41 voices included — on the GPU through Apple MLX, at 24 kHz. One model, 41 voices (28 in US and UK English, plus Spanish, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Hindi), no tiers and nothing to buy. There is no way to add a voice.

The honest summary: Voice Dream has far more voices and languages; Sandbook has a newer engine and gives you all of it for nothing. Audition both: Sandbook's voices page has a sample of every voice, and the app synthesizes each audition live with the real model, so what you hear is what a chapter sounds like.

• It keeps reading with the screen locked. Sandbook's real-time reading pauses when the screen locks, because the model holds GPU memory while it runs; only a chapter prepared ahead of time plays locked. If you listen to whole books while walking or driving, this alone decides it.
• Languages: 27 offline system languages and 30 for premium voices, against Sandbook's six.
• Formats — Word, PowerPoint, RTF, DAISY, Bookshare, Google Docs and audiobooks, on top of PDF, TXT and EPUB.
• Bookmarks, highlights and annotations, none of which Sandbook has.
• iCloud sync of library, reading position, bookmarks and notes across devices; Sandbook keeps everything on one device.
• Apple Watch and Apple Vision, plus a Mac app sold separately on the Mac App Store, where Sandbook is for iPhone and iPad.

Price, with no asterisk: free, no subscription, no per-voice purchase, no cap — against a listing that asks for a subscription before the app opens at all. No account, no ads, no tracking, and your books never leave the device. And a modern neural TTS model as the default rather than a paid add-on.

Two smaller things it does well: it rejoins the invisible line breaks and hyphen splits PDF layouts leave behind, so papers read as prose; and the read-along loop, with word-by-word highlighting, auto-scroll, tap to read, auto-advance between chapters and each book opening where you stopped, is the part of Voice Dream people use daily, at no cost. Both apps scan printed pages on the device.

You can also type a sentence for Sandbook's voices online and hear them before installing anything.