Narrate: Audiobook Read-Along
An audiobook player for iPhone that puts the book's words on screen, following the voice. Thousands of classic audiobooks are free to play, and the read-along is made on your iPhone. No account, no ads, no tracking.
Free · iPhone · iOS 26 or later
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
Chapter 1Pride and Prejudice
What it does
Look up from the page and keep going by ear. Look back down and the page is where the voice is. Narrate keeps the two together, for free books and for your own.
Discover holds public-domain classics read by LibriVox volunteers, each matched with the free ebook from Project Gutenberg. Austen, Conan Doyle, Shelley, Dickens, Tolstoy and many more. Pick a reading and it plays while it downloads.
What has been read stays dark, the word being said is bold, and what is still to come waits lighter. Tap any sentence and the audio jumps there.
Narrate listens to the audiobook on your iPhone, a few chapters ahead of you, and lines it up with the book. No server does it, so it works for any audiobook and ebook you are free to use, not only ones a shop has paired.
Who it's for
Start Middlemarch on the walk to work and carry on by eye on the sofa, from the same sentence. Long books stop being a project.
Hear how a word sounds while you see how it's written. Slow the voice down, tap back to a sentence, and turn on translation to see a paragraph in your own language under the original.
Follow the play or novel you're studying with the text in front of you, and tap straight back to the passage you need. Many set texts, from A Christmas Carol to Frankenstein, are classics with free readings.
Some readers follow a book more easily when they hear it and see it at once: tired eyes, a busy head, or a page that won't sit still. The voice carries you; the words are there when you look.
Bought an audiobook without copy protection, from a shop such as Libro.fm? Add it with the ebook and Narrate makes the read-along for that too.
Discover puts audiobooks and books in your iPhone's language at the top, from LibriVox, Project Gutenberg and free national catalogues such as Poland's Wolne Lektury.
Walkthroughs
No sign-in and nothing to set up.
For audiobooks sold or shared without copy protection.
The player is the one from our podcast app, Current.
And everything else
Books and the place you're up to are kept in your own iCloud Drive, so they're on every iPhone signed in to your Apple Account. With iCloud off, they stay on this iPhone.
Bookmark a book in Discover without downloading it, and find it on your Saved shelf when you're ready.
Page through a PDF book, scans included, while the audio plays, and jump to the page being read.
Add a book catalogue by its address (OPDS), or a public library in the Palace network, currently in the United States and Canada.
Connect Hardcover and what you're listening to shows on your Hardcover profile. Free, and off until you turn it on.
A Listen button that reads ebooks with no audiobook aloud, live on your iPhone.
Coming soonAt a glance
Want the long version about the books themselves? Free audiobooks with the text: where they come from and how to start.
Questions
Yes. Narrate is free to download, and the classic audiobooks and ebooks in Discover are free too. There is no account, no subscription, no ads and no in-app purchase.
The audiobooks are recorded by LibriVox volunteers, who give their readings to the public domain; the Internet Archive hosts them. The text comes from Project Gutenberg's public-domain ebooks, and from free catalogues such as Wolne Lektury. Narrate downloads each book from its source when you ask for it.
Narrate listens to the audiobook on your iPhone with Apple's on-device speech recognition and lines what it hears up with the ebook. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no Narrate server.
Narrate makes the text a few chapters ahead of where you are listening. The first chapter of a new book takes a little while; you can listen in the meantime.
No. Those shops lock their audiobooks so only their own apps can play them. Audiobooks sold without that lock, for example from Libro.fm, work: add the MP3, M4A or M4B files, or the ZIP they come in, from the Files app.
The languages your iPhone's on-device speech recognition supports. A book in another language still plays, without the text. Discover also shows audiobooks and books in your iPhone's language.
iPhone with iOS 26 or later. It also runs on iPad in its iPhone layout.
Meantime Studio, a small studio in London that also makes the podcast player Current. Write to [email protected] and a real person answers. More answers on the support page.
With thanks
To the volunteers of LibriVox, whose readers are named on every book, and to Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, Open Library and the free national libraries Narrate draws on. Narrate is not made by or affiliated with any of them.
Narrate is coming to the App Store for iPhone, free.