Sandbook

Sandbook is an offline text-to-speech reader for iPhone and iPad, for people who want to listen to books and documents without uploading them. It runs Kokoro-82M on the device through Apple MLX, with the speech model and voices included in the app. It needs no account and has no ads or tracking.

It reads EPUB and PDF files, Word documents, plain text, RTF, Markdown and HTML. Web articles enter the library without menus, ads or cookie banners; fetching them needs an internet connection, but saved articles play offline. Camera scans, photos and screenshots become readable text through on-device recognition. Image-only PDFs aren't supported.

Voices cover American and British English, Spanish, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Hindi. Word highlighting follows the speech, and each book remembers your position, voice and speed. Reading continues across chapters, while PDF text cleanup joins broken lines and hyphenated words before speech. Adjustable fonts, spacing and themes sit alongside support for VoiceOver, Voice Control and Switch Control.

Real-time speech pauses when the screen locks. Prepared chapter audio can keep playing with the screen off, and text in the Reader tab can export as M4A audio. Whole-book audiobook export and iCloud sync aren't supported.

Sandbook requires iOS 18.2 or later and an iPhone 12 or later, or an iPad with an A14 or M1 chip or later.