Oplæs

How to make your iPhone read text aloud

Your iPhone can already do it. Go to Settings › Accessibility › Read & Speak (called Spoken Content on iOS 17 and 18) and turn on Speak Screen. Then swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen, and the iPhone reads everything on it aloud. To hear just a paragraph, turn on Speak Selection, select the text and tap Speak. It’s free, works in almost any app and speaks many languages.

Read the whole screen: Speak Screen

  1. Open Settings and tap Accessibility.
  2. Tap Read & Speak. On iOS 17 and 18 it’s called Spoken Content.
  3. Turn on Speak Screen.
  4. Open the text you want to hear and swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen.

A small controller appears, where you can pause, change the speed and skip back or forward. You can also ask Siri to “Speak screen”. These steps are from Apple’s guide Hear iPhone speak the screen, selected text, and typing feedback.

Read just a part: Speak Selection

  1. In the same menu, turn on Speak Selection.
  2. Select the text you want to hear.
  3. Tap Speak.

Choose the voice and speed

Also under Read & Speak: Voices lets you pick a voice and dialect, Speaking Rate is a slider, and Detect Languages makes the iPhone switch language when the text does. You can also choose how words are highlighted as they’re read.

Where Speak Screen falls short

Speak Screen reads everything on the screen from the top, so on a busy web page it also reads menus, buttons and captions. It has no library or bookmarks, so in a long PDF or book you keep track of your place yourself.

On iOS 26 and later, Accessibility Reader helps with busy pages: it shows an app’s text in a clean full-screen view and can read it aloud. See Apple’s guide Read or listen to text in apps with Accessibility Reader.

When an app does it better

For long English or Danish texts there’s Oplæs, the app behind this website. Add a PDF, an ePub book, an article shared from Safari or a photo of a page, and it reads it aloud in natural voices, highlights every word and remembers where you stopped. Tap a sentence to start there. The voices run on the iPhone, so your texts never leave it, and reading works offline once they’ve downloaded (about 1.2 GB, on a recent iPhone).

Oplæs is free, with no ads, no subscription and no account. Comparing reading apps? See is Speechify free?

Get it on the App StoreMore about Oplæs