NaturalReader alternatives

What NaturalReader costs

US prices from NaturalReader's site and its App Store listing at the time of writing:

• Free: unlimited listening with the free voices, plus 5 minutes a day of the better "Plus" AI voices.
• Plus: $119 a year (about $9.92 a month) or $20.90 a month. Adds the Plus voices, MP3 downloads and the text scanner.
• Pro: $159 a year (about $13.25 a month) or $25.90 a month. Adds the most natural "Pro" voices.

Paid voices are capped at 500,000 characters a day, which few people reach. MP3 downloads are capped at 1 million characters a month, about 18 hours of audio. Older reviews quote lower prices, so check before you buy.

What NaturalReader does well

• It opens almost anything: PDF, Word, PowerPoint, RTF, text, DRM-free EPUB and images, plus Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive.
• It saves audio as MP3 on paid plans, so you can play it in any player.
• It scans printed pages with your camera on paid plans.
• It runs everywhere: web, iPhone, Android, with offline mode in the apps, and a Chrome extension used by about a million people.

If you use those features every week, the price is fair, and you may not need an alternative.

NaturalReader alternatives compared

US prices at the time of writing.

Free alternatives

If NaturalReader's free voices are good enough for you, these are too, and you already have them:

• Microsoft Edge Read aloud reads web pages and PDFs in natural voices, free on Windows and Mac. Press Ctrl+Shift+U. See read a PDF aloud.
• Chrome reads pages in reading mode on a computer and with Listen to this page on Android. See Chrome read aloud.
• The Read Aloud extension for Chrome is free, open source, and reads PDFs and Google Docs. See Google Docs read aloud.
• Phones have Speak Screen on iPhone and Select to Speak on Android.

Paid alternatives

ElevenReader

The reading app from ElevenLabs, whose voices are some of the most natural around. It imports PDFs, EPUBs, links, pasted text and scans. The free plan includes 10 hours of text-to-audio a month, which beats NaturalReader's 5 minutes a day of good voices by a wide margin. Ultra costs $11 a month or $99 a year. For most people leaving NaturalReader over price, this is the one to try first. More in our ElevenReader comparison.

Speechify

The best-known reader, with a large voice library, apps on every platform and a camera scanner. It costs more than NaturalReader: $139 a year or $29 a month. See our Speechify comparison.

Voice Dream

Long a favourite of blind and low-vision readers on iPhone, iPad and Mac. Its built-in voices work offline, and it reads EPUB, DAISY and Bookshare books. It's subscription-only for new users. See our Voice Dream alternatives.

For email, newsletters and articles: Spokeninbox

If you pay for a reader mainly to get through newsletters and articles, Spokeninbox is cheaper and less work. You forward newsletters to your private address, or paste an article's link, and press Play. It removes clutter like buttons, legal footers and raw links before reading, so you don't hear long web addresses read out.

• Plans: 60 free minutes a month. Plus is $9.99 a month or $89.99 a year for 10 hours a month.
• Plays with your phone locked on iPhone, and remembers where you stopped.
• Queue with autoplay in the web app and the Mac and Windows apps.
• English, Spanish and Russian, each with its own voice.

It doesn't read Word files, EPUBs or scanned pages, and it can't save MP3s. If you need those, stay with NaturalReader or try ElevenReader.

Hear Spokeninbox read a newsletter

Play a 30-second English newsletter sample. No sign-in needed.

Listen: thirty-minute lentil soup

English voice sample, about 30 seconds. Download MP3.

Read the sample transcript

Good morning. This week's recipe is a simple lentil soup that takes about thirty minutes and keeps well for days. Soften one chopped onion, two carrots and a stick of celery in olive oil. Add two cloves of garlic, a teaspoon of cumin and a pinch of chili flakes. Stir in a cup of red lentils, a tin of chopped tomatoes and four cups of stock. Simmer for twenty minutes, until the lentils fall apart. Finish with a squeeze of lemon and a handful of chopped parsley. Serve with warm bread.

Open Spokeninbox in your browser. No download needed. You get 1 hour free each month; paid plans start at $9.99 a month.

Start listening in your browser →

How to choose

• You need MP3 files, Word or PowerPoint: stay with NaturalReader.
• You want better voices without paying: ElevenReader's free plan.
• You only read the odd page or PDF: Edge, Chrome or your phone's built-in reader.
• You read on Apple devices and need offline voices: Voice Dream.
• Your reading pile is mostly newsletters and articles: Spokeninbox.

Questions

Still stuck? The support page has more help.