Lector
Your documents, read aloud — by your iPhone, on your iPhone.
Offline. Private. No subscription.
Download on the App Store · free · iOS 17 or later
Your documents, read aloud — by your iPhone, on your iPhone.
Offline. Private. No subscription.
Download on the App Store · free · iOS 17 or laterImport a PDF, an EPUB, a Word document, or an article from Safari, press play, and Lector reads it to you — while you work, while you drive, while you walk the dog, while dinner cooks. The sentence being spoken stays highlighted so you never lose your place, and playback continues in the background with the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island in reach. New in version 1.2: see a PDF as printed, with the sentence being read highlighted on the page itself, and bring in books from your own ebook server.
Lector is Latin for reader, from legere, to read. The word has been doing honest work for two thousand years, and it has always meant the same thing: one person reads aloud so that others can attend to what they are doing.
The lector is the one appointed to read the Scripture lessons aloud in the service — an office old enough to be counted among the minor orders of the ancient church. The congregation hears the Word while the lector carries the text.
Monastic communities ate their meals in silence while a lector read from Scripture or the fathers. The meal fed the body; the reading fed everything else.
In the cigar factories of Cuba, and later of Key West and Tampa, the rollers pooled their own money to hire a lector, who sat on a raised platform and read newspapers and novels aloud over the workbenches. Skilled hands, occupied ears.
This app takes the old office and puts it in your pocket. The text is yours; the lector is your iPhone.
Lector speaks with Apple’s own voices, generated entirely on the device. Every voice installed on your iPhone appears in the app, grouped by language, with your favorites pinned to the top.
One recommendation before you settle in: download an Enhanced or Premium voice. The standard voices are serviceable, but the higher tiers are markedly closer to a human reader — fuller, smoother, better paced — and they are free downloads. On your iPhone, open Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → Voices, choose a language, and look for the names marked Enhanced or Premium. Once downloaded, the voice appears in Lector automatically.
These ten-second samples are the standard tier, so you are hearing the floor, not the ceiling. The Enhanced and Premium downloads of these same voices are a clear step up — which is rather the point of recommending them.
Everything in Lector is free to use. The free library holds three imported documents at a time — delete one and the slot opens again — and typed text, shared articles, and web pages never count against it. A single purchase removes the cap for good.
I was tired of apps that offered a three-day trial and then wanted a hundred and twenty dollars a year. So Lector is built the other way around: the free version is the full app, not a demonstration of one, and the only thing money buys is a bigger bookshelf. If the app earns a place in your day, ten dollars — once — removes the cap. That is the entire business model.
Lector 1.2 is on the App Store — released 19 September 2026, five days after 1.0 arrived alongside iOS 27. Prefer to run ahead of the releases? The TestFlight beta stays open, and beta builds carry the newest features first, free, including the unlimited library.
Get Lector on the App Store or join the beta on TestFlightSomething read wrong, sound wrong, or clip on your screen? TestFlight’s built-in feedback (take a screenshot, then tap Share Beta Feedback) goes straight to the developer.
Lector processes everything on the device. This is not a policy that could change with an update to the terms; Lector has no server to send anything to.
The full policy is one page: the Lector privacy policy.