Lectern: Text to Speech Reader
Listen to PDFs, books & notes
Only for iPhone
Free · In‑App Purchases
iPhone
Natural voices that run on your iPhone. Private, offline, unlimited. Listen to PDFs, books and notes with your screen locked.
Listen to anything.
Lectern turns the things you already read into something you can listen to. Import a PDF, an EPUB book, a Word document, notes, an article, or a photo of a printed page, press play, and hear it in a natural voice, generated entirely on your iPhone.
PRIVATE BY DESIGN
Your documents never leave your phone. Text extraction, page scanning and speech generation all run on the device. No account, no upload, no server.
WORKS OFFLINE. NO CREDITS.
The voices are built in. Listen for as long as you like, on a plane or in a tunnel, with nothing metered.
MADE FOR LONG LISTENING
Whole books, textbooks, reports. Playback keeps going with the screen locked, the lock screen and Control Center show what's playing, and Lectern remembers exactly where you stopped, to the sentence, even after the app is closed.
FOLLOW ALONG
The sentence being read is highlighted and the page scrolls with it. Tap any sentence to start there. Skip by chapter, by 15 seconds, or scrub the whole document.
YOUR PACE
Half speed to three times speed, and it still sounds like a person.
WHAT IT READS
• PDF, including scanned PDFs (on-device text recognition)
• EPUB books with chapters and covers
• Word documents (.docx), text, Markdown, RTF
• Pasted text from anywhere
• Photos of pages, from the camera or your library
LECTERN PRO
Lectern Pro unlocks whole books and long documents, an unlimited library, all ten studio voices, and audio export. The free version lets you listen to real documents first, so you can hear the voices before you decide.
Lectern Pro is available as a monthly or annual subscription, or a one-time lifetime purchase. Subscriptions renew automatically unless cancelled at least 24 hours before the end of the period. Manage or cancel in Settings › Apple Account › Subscriptions.
Privacy policy: https://luke-fairbanks.github.io/privacy-policy/lectern/
Terms of use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
Ratings & Reviews
- This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
The developer, Faba Development LLC, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Linked to You
The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:
- Purchases
- Usage Data
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Faba Development LLC
- Size
- 199.4 MB
- Category
- Productivity
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 17.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 17.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
- English
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- In-App Purchases
Yes
- Lectern Pro Lifetime $59.99
- Lectern Pro Monthly $5.99
- Lectern Pro Annual $29.99
- Copyright
- © 2026 Faba Development LLC