Listening to documents in 31 languages
Your document decides the language, not a settings menu. What that sounds like, what is still rough, and which language is not there yet.
In short: You never choose the language. The document decides, the voice follows, and after one download it all works with no connection.
Most read-aloud apps are English tools with a language menu bolted on the side. You open a German PDF, it reads it in English, and you spend a minute in settings finding out that the German voice is a separate download, or a paid tier, or a robot from 2009.
The reasonable expectation is that you open a German document and hear German. That is what this post is about, along with the parts that are still not good enough.
You do not pick the language
Open the document. It reads it in the language it is written in.
The app works that out from the text itself, before it says a word. There is no menu, no per-document setting to remember, and no moment where you wonder why Spanish is coming out with an English accent.
Occasionally it will get this wrong, and it is always the same situation: a document that is mostly one language with a long quotation, abstract or bibliography in another. When that happens you can set the language yourself for that one document, and it stays set.
English works immediately. Everything else asks once
English voices ship inside the app. Nothing to download, nothing to enable — install it and it reads.
The first time you open a document in any other language, it offers a single download of about 268 MB. That one download covers every other language on the list. After it finishes, all of them work offline, permanently, with no connection and no account.
That is the whole setup. There is no menu of engines to choose between and no quality tier to buy — deliberately, because every version of that choice is a question the app should be answering for you.
The thirty-one
Alongside English: Arabic, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.
Worth pointing at the ones people assume will be missing from something that runs entirely on a phone: Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Russian, Turkish and Vietnamese are all there, at the same quality as the European ones, with no connection required for any of them.
Chinese is not there yet
Said plainly, because you should find this out on a blog rather than after installing.
Chinese is not supported. Not Mandarin, not Cantonese, not simplified or traditional. It is the most-requested gap and the work to close it is real work, not a checkbox — so there is no date to give you. If Chinese is what you need, this is not your app today.
What is rougher outside English
Two things, and they are worth knowing before you decide.
The word highlight is less precise. In English, the highlighted word is derived from the audio itself, so it lands exactly on the word being spoken. In the other thirty it is estimated from the length of the words, which means it can run slightly ahead or behind inside a long sentence. The sentence highlight is always correct, so you never lose your place — but if you are reading along closely in Finnish, you will notice the word box drift and then catch up.
The voices are not native personalities. There are ten of them, described by how they sound rather than where they are from — warm, calm, bright, deep, and so on. Each one reads all thirty-one languages.
That has an upside: you find a voice you like and it stays with you across everything you read, so your Spanish paper and your German novel are read by the same person. The downside is the honest one — there is no voice that was built to sound like a Parisian, or like someone from Osaka. They are good, and they are not local.
All of it stays on your device
The one download is the only time any of this touches the network.
After that, the language detection, the voice and the audio all happen on your Mac, iPhone or iPad. A confidential document in Dutch is not uploaded to a server in order to be read back to you, which for most of the categories of document worth listening to — contracts, medical letters, unpublished manuscripts, anything a client sent you — is the difference between using this and not.
You can check that claim in a minute, incidentally, and you should check it on any app that makes it: turn the network off and open something you have never opened before. Cloud voices either fail or fall back to something noticeably flatter. Local ones sound identical.
If you read in more than one language
The practical version of all this: a French article in the morning, an English paper at lunch, a German book in the evening, and at no point do you touch a language setting. It just reads what is in front of it.
That works the same whether it is a paper, a book or something you saved to read later. If you want to see how this compares with the cloud tools, which do offer far more languages and do upload your document to deliver them, that trade-off is laid out here.