Aloudeo vs Speechify: which reader fits your iPhone?

You've probably heard of Speechify: it's one of the best-known text to speech apps, with years of polish, a big voice catalog and a presence on almost every device you own. With Aloudeo, you go another way: you hear natural Kokoro voices that run on your phone, so you listen with no connection and your files never leave your iPhone. Here is how the two compare, row by row, and how to pick the one that fits the way you read.

See what Speechify does well

Give Speechify its due before anything else. You can see why so many people use it in four places:

• Every device. You get apps for iPhone, Android and Mac, plus a Chrome extension. Start an article on your laptop at work and finish it on your phone on the way home, with one library in sync.
• Voices and languages. You choose from a large catalog of natural voices across dozens of languages, far more than any phone-only app carries.
• Reading on the web. The Chrome extension adds a play button to web pages and Google Docs, which helps a lot if you spend your day in a browser.
• Extras. You also get tools beyond reading aloud, like summaries and scanning paper pages with your camera.

If you read most of your day at a desk, in Chrome, across several devices, pick Speechify.

Know what you trade for the cloud

You hear Speechify's most natural voices from its servers. That's how you get so many voices on every device. The trade-off shows up in three places:

1. Signal. With a cloud voice, your text goes out and the audio comes back. On a plane, in the subway or abroad without data, you need to download your reading ahead of time, and on Speechify's plan list, offline downloads sit under Premium.
2. Your files. Your text travels to a server to become audio, and you sign in with an account so your library syncs.
3. Price. Premium runs on a monthly or yearly subscription. Check Speechify's pricing page for today's price, because it changes with plans and offers.

None of that makes Speechify worse. It's the cost of a library that follows you everywhere.

Hear voices that run on your phone

With Aloudeo, you download the voice once, the first time you press play. After that, you hear everything on your shelf with no connection at all. You open a PDF from Files on a plane and press play. You scan a page in a basement library with no signal and listen. Only new web pages need a connection to load the first time. The offline listening page has the full list.

You make no account and you see no ads. No word you hear goes to a server to become audio.

You choose from 14 English voices, plus voices in Spanish, French, Japanese and Mandarin. That list is shorter than Speechify's. If you need Korean, German or Arabic today, pick Speechify.

Compare the price over a year

You can pay for Aloudeo three ways, or stay on the free plan:

The lifetime option matters if you hate subscriptions: you pay once and keep Pro. Put the yearly price of each app side by side on the day you decide, and set a reminder for the day before any trial ends. To cancel an App Store subscription on your iPhone, open Settings, tap your name at the top, then tap Subscriptions.

Bring the formats you actually read

In both apps you open PDFs and web pages and scan paper pages with the camera. Check the rest against your own reading.

In Aloudeo you open PDF, EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, FB2, Word (DOCX), RTF, Markdown, plain text, web pages and camera scans. Your files land in the Articles, Papers, Books, Documents and Notes folders, each with your place and the time left. Ebooks need to come without DRM: books bought in a store that locks them stay in that store's app. The ebook formats page explains where DRM-free books come from, and the PDF page shows what you hear from a messy PDF.

If you read old FB2 or AZW3 files, test them in Speechify before you subscribe.

Listen to a novel with a cast

On a novel in Aloudeo, you can give the narrator one voice and each character another. Turn on Give every character a voice in the reader, and you hear who speaks in every conversation. It works with Pro, and the character voices page shows how each line finds its voice and where it stops.

Follow along with your eyes

In both apps you see the text light up as you listen, which helps you keep your place on dense pages. In Aloudeo, the sentence you hear turns violet and the page scrolls with it. Tap any sentence to jump there, press back once to restart the paragraph and twice for the paragraph before. Lock your iPhone and the sentence moves to a card on the Lock Screen with play, pause, back and forward. The follow-along highlight page covers every control.

Page numbers, running headers, citation brackets and links stay off the voice, and abbreviations come out in full, so "Mr." sounds like "Mister" and "Fig. 3" like "Figure 3". Listen for both in your test below.

Try both on the same file: a worked example

Give each app one evening with the same three files:

1. Pick a 20-page PDF, a long article and the first chapter of an ebook.
2. Share all three to Speechify and to Aloudeo.
3. Listen to ten minutes of the PDF in each, at the same speed. Listen for page numbers and citation brackets.
4. Turn on Airplane Mode from Control Center, then open the article you haven't played yet and press play in each app.
5. Close both apps, reopen them, and check that each starts at the sentence where you stopped.
6. Write down the yearly cost of each.

At 165 words a minute, the pace the listening time tool plans with, a 5,000-word article runs about 30 minutes at 1x and 20 minutes at 1.5x, so you hear the whole test inside one evening.

Pick the one that fits your day

If your reading happens in short bursts on screen, try the free option first: the commute page and Aloudeo vs Speak Screen show where Apple's built-in reader stops. For a wider look at what to test in any reader, read how to pick a text to speech app for iPhone.

Join the Aloudeo waitlist at aloudeo.app.