Turn any article into listening

From Web Page. In the library, tap + and choose From Web Page. Paste the link with the Paste button (no clipboard permission prompt), and Sandbook checks that it is a real web address before fetching anything. A progress card shows while the page downloads, with a Cancel button if you change your mind.

Share from Safari. Reading something in Safari that you would rather hear? Tap Share and choose Sandbook. The link goes into the same path as the + menu, so the result is the same. If the fetch fails, for example with no signal, the page waits in the inbox for Retry or Discard rather than disappearing.

A web page is mostly not the article. Navigation, sidebars, ad slots, cookie banners, newsletter prompts, share rails and “you might also like” widgets all compete with the text, and a reader that speaks them all is unbearable after a minute.

Sandbook reduces the page to the article before a word is spoken. It keeps the title, the author, the date and the site name, and shows them at the top of the article the way a magazine would. The cover in your library comes from the page's own image or its icon, so a shelf of saved articles is recognizable at a glance.

Everything else is dropped. What you hear is the body text of the article, in order.

Adding a page is the only step that needs a connection. After that the article is a book in your library, stored on the device, with a word count, a listening-time estimate and your place saved. Queue up a few long reads on Wi-Fi and listen to them on the plane, where offline text to speech is the whole point.

Each article can have its own voice and speed, the same as a book. A long essay in a calm voice at 1.2×, a Spanish news story in a Spanish voice: Sandbook has 41 voices in six languages, and the voice decides the language.

The article opens in Sandbook's reader, not in a player. The current paragraph is softly tinted and each word is marked as it is spoken, so you can glance down and find your place. Tap any paragraph to read from there; scroll away and a “Back to current” button brings you back.

Reading Options apply here too: light, sepia or dark, five fonts including Legible, text size and line spacing. It is the same reader as for EPUB books, which is the point: an article saved from the web gets the same care as a book.

When you add a page, Sandbook requests it, and its cover image or icon, directly from the site that hosts it, exactly as a browser would. There is no Sandbook server in the middle: the address and the article are not sent to anyone else. Reducing the page to the article and generating the speech both happen on your iPhone.

One practical consequence: Sandbook sees what the site serves to a plain request. It does not share Safari's logins or cookies, so a page behind a sign-in usually arrives as a teaser. Public articles, blogs, newsletters on the web and documentation work best. More on what stays on the device is on the private text-to-speech page.