For iPhone & iPad
Anything you want to read, you can listen to instead: a webpage, a PDF, a book, a printed page, the tabs piling up in your browser. Timber reads it aloud in a voice you choose.
Anything you want to read, you can listen to instead: webpages, PDFs, books, printed pages, your open tabs.
† Free to download · iOS 18 and later
Why it exists
“…I wanted to make sure that everyone had access to a tool to help them explore the Internet while learning how to read quality information.”
So, from the first day
Who it’s for
Listen to keep up, to rest your eyes, or to get through the reading with your hands full.
Hear the chapter and follow along on the page. Get the gist first from a short summary, and cite it in MLA or APA when you write it up.
Mark passages while you listen, then hand out what you marked as a worksheet or a study guide. The lesson is ready when the listening is done.
Dyslexia mode swaps in a friendlier typeface, bolds the first letter of each word, opens up the spacing and adds a warm tint.
VoiceOver works throughout the app, and text grows to the largest sizes. Point your camera at a letter, a menu or a handout and hear it read back.
Send the tabs you meant to read to your phone as one queue, then listen from the lock screen or your headphones.
Slow the voice down and follow each word, or translate an article on your phone and hear it in the language you are learning.
Every accessibility setting is free: VoiceOver, Dynamic Type, Reduced Motion, Increase Contrast and the full dyslexia mode.
See the accessibility workHow it works
Ever asked your phone to read a page aloud and had it stop halfway, or skip the part that mattered? Timber pulls out the full text before it says a word. What you bring in is what you hear, start to finish.
Paste a link, or share from Safari or any other browser. Open a PDF, an EPUB, or a Word or PowerPoint file. Or point your camera at a printed page.
Play a sample of any voice before you download it. Once it is on your phone, it works with no connection.
Every word lights up as it is spoken, whether you slow the voice down or speed it up.
Scanned chapters repeat the same header on every page. Timber spots the repeat and silences it across the whole document in one tap, so you hear the chapter and nothing else.
Four voices · four engines · provenance
“Timber reads it out loud, and follows along while it does.”
“Timber reads it out loud, and follows along while it does.”
“Timber reads it out loud, and follows along while it does.”
“Then pick a voice. Hundreds and hundreds of voices, free.”
† All four are free voices, recorded straight out of Timber.
The voices
In every language, each voice library gives you a free male and a free female voice. Every Apple voice on your device works too, Enhanced and Premium included, and so does your Apple Personal Voice.
Also inside
Every screen below is a capture of the app as it ships on the App Store, not a mockup.
Trust
Today every voice runs on your phone, so Timber keeps reading on a plane, in a tunnel, anywhere. Nothing you read leaves your phone unless you ask it to.
Timber will never
The big read-aloud apps send your text to a server and charge a subscription for the good voices. Timber does the reading on your iPhone. Every figure came from each company’s own live page, and the longer comparisons below include the parts where they beat us.
| Timber | The others, typically | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the voice runs | On your iPhone | On their servers |
| Account needed | No | Yes |
| Voices without paying | 324, in 71 languages | A handful, or a monthly hour cap |
| Works with no signal | Yes | Usually not |
| Reads a photo of a page | Yes | Sometimes, on the paid tier |
| Turns a chapter into a worksheet | Yes | No |
| Android and web | No, Apple only | Usually yes |
The long versions
Timber Pro
Pro opens the rest of the voice catalog, the full speed range and a few extras. It also keeps a free, private reader going for everyone else.
Everything in the free list stays free, with or without Pro.
Fig. 02 · The collector, on your Mac
✶ Timber Tabs · free for Mac & Windows
Timber Tabs gathers the pile of tabs you keep meaning to read, groups them by site, and pre-selects the ones that actually read like articles. Keep what you want, then send the list to your iPhone, or save a portable .timberlist file you can put anywhere.
† On Windows? Use the Chrome, Edge or Firefox extension. No Mac needed. See how →
† …and every other Chromium browser, because the extension installs in all of them. Read straight from the browser on your Mac, or through the Timber Tabs extension; Firefox always needs the extension.
Your tabs are sorted on your Mac, or right in your browser on Windows. Timber Tabs reads only their titles and addresses, never the pages, and sends nothing to a server of ours.
Start listening
Your eyes can be tired, busy, or somewhere else. The reading still gets done.
† Free to download · no account · iOS 18 and later