Comparison
Two readers built for people who learn and read differently, aimed at different problems. Voice Dream Reader has been an accessibility standby for over a decade, with deep ties to Bookshare and a large menu of extra voices you buy one at a time. Timber is newer, free to start with no account, and keeps the reading itself on your iPhone. Here is the honest version, including the parts where Voice Dream Reader wins.
† Voice Dream Reader figures read from its own App Store listing on 20 September 2026
Timber: on your iPhone. The speech is generated on the device, so it works on a plane and nothing is uploaded to be read.
Voice Dream Reader: also on the device. Its own App Store listing says all its voices, including the extra ones you can buy, work offline.
Timber: nothing, and no account. 324 voices across 71 languages are included. Extra features are an optional one-time or subscription purchase.
Voice Dream Reader: free to download, but a subscription is required to keep using it after a free trial. Its App Store listing doesn't show the price on the page itself; Apple shows it at checkout.
Timber: 324 without paying, in 71 languages, counting Apple’s own voices, plus your Apple Personal Voice.
Voice Dream Reader: 36 built-in iOS voices in 27 languages at no extra cost, plus 200+ additional voices in 30 languages from Acapela, NeoSpeech and Ivona, some sold one at a time.
Timber: 0.5x to 1.25x free, and the full 0.3x to 3x with Pro. The slow end is as useful as the fast end for anyone learning a language or following a hard page.
Voice Dream Reader: its listing doesn't publish a speed multiplier. Instead it offers two speed-reading training modes, called Pac-Man and RSVP, meant to build your reading speed with practice.
Timber: whole webpages, PDFs including scanned ones, EPUB books, Word and PowerPoint files, a photo of a printed page, RSS feeds, Project Gutenberg, and every tab open in your browser.
Voice Dream Reader: PDF (with a built-in scanner for paper pages), plain text, Word, PowerPoint, RTF, Google Docs, web articles, Bookshare books, DRM-free EPUB, DAISY books and audiobooks, and MP3/MP4 audiobooks, with native access to Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, Pocket, Instapaper and Evernote.
Timber: iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. iOS 18 and later. No Android, no web version.
Voice Dream Reader: iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, per its App Store listing. A separate app, Voice Dream Reader Desktop, brings it to the Mac on its own subscription.
Timber: mark passages while you listen and hand out what you marked as a worksheet, with MLA and APA citations built in. Repeating headers and footers in a scanned chapter can be silenced across the whole document in one tap.
Voice Dream Reader: highlights, notes and full-text search you can export, a pronunciation dictionary for words it reads wrong, automatic skipping of repeating PDF headers and footers, and built-in access to Bookshare for students who qualify.
A comparison page that only flatters its own product is an advertisement. These are real:
Students and readers who qualify can read straight from Bookshare’s accessible-book library inside the app. Timber has nothing like this.
It reads DAISY text-based books and audiobooks, a format many schools and accessible-format libraries still rely on. Timber doesn’t open DAISY files.
200+ additional voices across 30 languages you can buy individually, on top of years of dedicated VoiceOver, Braille display and Switch Control support built specifically for assistive use.
Native connections to Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, Pocket, Instapaper and Evernote, so material already living in those accounts doesn’t need to be moved first.
The honest summary: Voice Dream Reader is a mature, specialist accessibility tool with library and format ties Timber doesn’t have. Timber is the newer, simpler option: free to start, no account, and nothing to configure before it reads to you.
It takes about a minute and costs nothing to find out which one you like listening to.