SchriftOhr
Read it, or have it read to you
Open an EPUB, PDF, or Markdown file and read it on a real page — or have it read aloud in a natural voice, on device and offline. Your place is the same place either way: stop listening and the page opens where the voice stopped; read ahead and the voice picks up from your eyes.
In early testing on TestFlight · coming to the App Store for iPhone, iPad & MacWant to help test it? Email me for a TestFlight invite.
iOS 18 and macOS 15 or later. The neural voices run entirely on your device — on the Neural Engine where the machine has one, with the graphics processor or main processor standing in where it doesn't.
What it does
Read
- Real justified pages you scroll or turn, in five looks from Paper to Midnight
- Your own margins, line spacing, type size, and a dyslexia-friendly face
- Start the voice from any line and the page follows it, turning as the spoken word reaches the next page
- One place per book, shared between reading and listening — mid-sentence
- One column, or a two-page spread on wide screens — your choice, in Reading Style
Listen
- Reads EPUB, PDF, and Markdown/plain-text files aloud
- Apple's natural voices, or eighteen included neural voices that run entirely on device — no account, no subscription. The speech model itself downloads once, then everything works offline
- The sentence being read stays highlighted, teleprompter style, with the spoken word underlined
- Picks up exactly where you left off, per book
A cast of voices
- The app reads the book and finds who speaks — then you give the main characters their own voices
- The narrator reads the prose and everyone else, the way a good audiobook does it
- Spoken-play mode for dialogue books and plays: the names aren't read aloud — the voices carry the parts, like a radio drama
- Where a line has no name attached, you can settle it yourself — or cast by voice type and let the whole book follow
- On Apple Intelligence devices, an on-device second reader quietly helps settle who speaks — never sending a word off your device
Bring your own library
- Point it at a folder of books you already own — it reads them where they lie and never moves, renames or deletes anything
- A thousand books indexed in under a second, sifted by shelf, author or series
- Search by title or author across everything at once
- Or keep a copy in the app's own library, synced through iCloud
Teach it a name
- Type a name as it's printed and how it should sound — hear it in the book's own voice before you keep it
- Taught once, it holds in every book
- Your pronunciations follow you between your devices, and can be written to a file to keep or share
Says it right
- An included dictionary of hundreds of measured fixes — the words neural voices famously fumble, corrected out of the box
- Initials, B.C. and A.D., chapter-and-verse references, calibres and hyphenated compounds read the way you'd say them
- Heteronyms settled by meaning — it knows a lead pipe from a lead role, asking an on-device model where grammar alone can't tell
Keep what you find
- Hold a passage to keep it with a colour and a note
- Bookmarks and kept passages in one notebook, with a Markdown export
- Find in Book, and a contents list that works while reading or listening
Made for the car
- A driving view with big play/pause and skip buttons
- “Mark this spot” — one tap to flag a place to review later
- Plays with the screen off, or keeps it awake while you read
- Download the neural voice once for fully offline listening
On your Mac
- Every tool in the menu bar with a shortcut — contents, find, notebook, reading style, the voices, play and pause
- Turn pages with the arrow keys; the same tools sit at the foot of the window in the order you choose
- Screen off takes the whole display black while it reads on
- One universal app: Apple silicon and Intel both run it natively
Export an audiobook
- Turn any book into a chaptered .m4b audiobook with cover art — on iPhone, iPad, or Mac
- The cast comes with it: every character in their own voice, exactly as the live reading sounds
- On iPhone and iPad the finished audiobook lands on your shelf, ready to play or share; the Mac saves it wherever you choose
- Interrupted exports pick up where they left off
Read together — coming
- A reading circle around one book: see where each reader stands, share violet marks, and talk in threads anchored to the passages
- Join by a link — and read the circle's conversation in any web browser, on any device; the owner can grant a voice to reply from the web too
- Each member brings their own copy of the book — the circle shares the conversation, never the book's files
- Your private pens and notes never travel; only the circle's violet does
- Sponsored reads: a circle can carry its group's or publisher's name — "presented by" on the page, with a link to get your own copy of the book
Where to find books →
- Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg and Monergism — thousands of books, free, in EPUB
- Publishers who sell you a file to download and keep, rather than permission to read
- Why DRM decides whether a book is really yours — and what to look for before you buy
- Download one on your phone, open it here, and it's on your shelf for good
Private by design
Speech and books are handled on your device. Reading and speaking happen on your Mac or iPhone, and none of it — books, reading activity, generated audio — is ever sent to RFRMD Word Labs. No accounts, no analytics, no ads. If you sign in to iCloud, what you choose to sync (your library, places, notebook, casts, pronunciations, settings) lives in your own iCloud account, handled by Apple, where we cannot see it. The neural voice model downloads once from its public host — an ordinary download, seen by that host like any other — and speech works offline from then on. Details in the privacy policy.
You are responsible for having the right to read or copy the books you open. Audio SchriftOhr makes is for your own personal use — SchriftOhr does not grant rights in books or voices.
About the name
SchriftOhr is German for writing-ear — Schrift, writing, and Ohr, ear. Which is the whole app in one word: what is written, heard.
It was called text2Ear until July 2026. Same app, same developer, and it shares its Schrift with MarkSchrift.