OpenRead: Offline Read Aloud

Bring in a book, choose a voice, press play. Fourteen Vietnamese voices synthesised on your iPhone — no account, no server, and no connection once the voice pack is in.

OpenRead reads your own books aloud in Vietnamese, on your device, with no account and no internet connection.

Bring in a story as a text file, an EPUB, a PDF or a web page, pick a voice, and press play. Speech is generated on your iPhone while you listen — no sentence is ever uploaded, and once the voice pack is installed the app works in airplane mode.

FOURTEEN VIETNAMESE VOICES • Seven male and seven female, across northern, central and southern accents • Three styles: Natural, News and Storytelling • Speed from 0.5x to 2x, adjustable in the middle of a sentence • Or use the iOS system voices already on your device — nothing to download, and they cover every language iOS speaks

READ ANYTHING YOU OWN • Text files and text you simply paste in • EPUB, with chapters picked up automatically • PDF, reflowed into readable text instead of pinch-and-zoom pages • Web pages, opened in the built-in browser and stripped down to the article There is no catalogue and no store inside OpenRead. It reads the files you bring it. Two public-domain tales come with the app so there is something to press play on straight away.

FOLLOW ALONG, SENTENCE BY SENTENCE The sentence being spoken lights up as you read, and the page scrolls itself to keep it in view. Tap any line to send the voice there.

BUILT FOR LONG LISTENING • Keeps playing with the screen off, with lock-screen and Control Centre controls • Skip by chapter, jump back 15 seconds, or open the table of contents • Sleep timer by minutes, or stop at the end of the chapter • Your exact place is remembered in every book

A READER YOU CAN SETTLE INTO • Continuous scroll, or turn pages • Four paper tones, four text sizes, light and dark • Bookmarks with your own notes • Groups, to keep a long series together • Vietnamese and English throughout the app

PRIVATE BY DEFAULT No account, no sign-in, no analytics, no advertising identifier, no ads. Your books, bookmarks, notes, reading position and settings are stored only on your device. The only network requests OpenRead makes are ones you start yourself: downloading the voice pack, and opening a page in the built-in browser.

OpenRead is free, and complete. The single in-app purchase is a tip — it unlocks nothing.

The fourteen preset voices come from the VieNeu-TTS project by Phạm Nguyễn Ngọc Bảo (pnnbao-ump), licensed Apache-2.0. Full credits and licence texts are inside the app, under Settings → Licences & credits, and also at https://opr.vuba.one/credits.php

Part of vuba.one. iPhone and iPad, iOS 16 or later.