Listen2 User Guide

Table of Contents

• 1. Getting Started
• 2. Importing Content
• 3. Your Library
• 4. The Reader
• 5. Playback
• 6. Highlighting & Auto-Scroll
• 7. Voices & Languages
• 8. Collections
• 9. Text Display
• 10. Bookmarks & Search
• 11. Accessibility
• 12. Tips, Troubleshooting & Support

1. Getting Started

For years, your options when considering how best to listen to text read aloud on iOS have relied on the tried and true built-in system voices (robotic, flat) or cloud-based services that charge a monthly fee, send your documents to someone else's servers, and often restrict usage. Listen2 is a third option. It runs high-quality, natural-sounding voices entirely on your device. No account, no cloud processing, no tracking. Your documents stay on your phone and never leave.

In one sentence: Listen2 turns your documents into personal audiobooks using on-device text-to-speech.

Getting from zero to listening takes about 60 seconds. A voice comes pre-installed, so there is no need to download or configure anything first. The process is as follows:

1. Import something — tap the + button and select a PDF, EPUB, text file, Word document, or DAISY book from your device or cloud service. You can also import text from your clipboard.
2. Press play.
3. Listen.

And because everything runs on device, there is no signup screen, no email verification, no "create your account to continue." You open the app and you are in. No account needed.

Privacy

Your documents are yours. Nothing gets uploaded, analyzed, or shared. The text-to-speech engine, the voices, the processing — it all happens locally on your iPhone or iPad. Whether you are importing work emails, personal journals, or other content, that content stays private by default. Personal content remains personal. No setting adjustments necessary.

Trial and Licensing

Listen2 comes with a 7-day free trial so you can make sure it fits your workflow. After that, it is a one-time purchase. Not a subscription. You buy it once and it is yours for life.

2. Importing Content

You have text scattered everywhere. PDFs from work, articles you saved in Safari, ebooks you downloaded, notes you copied from an email. Listen2 can pull content from all of these places. Here are all the methods for getting content into your library.

Import from Files

Tap the + button and choose "Import from Files." This opens the standard iOS Files picker, which means you are not limited to what is on your device. iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive — if it shows up in your Files app, you can import from it. Pick your file, and it lands in your library.

Import from Clipboard

This one is more useful than it sounds. Say you just asked ChatGPT a question while you are out on a walk and you want to hear the answer instead. Tap the copy button at the bottom of ChatGPT's message, switch to Listen2, tap +, choose "Import from Clipboard," and you are done. Works with anything you can copy — web articles, emails, notes, recipes, and more.

Import from Link

Tap +, choose "Import from Link," and paste in a URL. Listen2 fetches the page, strips out the navigation bars and ads, and keeps the article text. You get the content without the clutter. Google Drive share links work here too — if someone shares a document with you via a Drive link, paste it in and Listen2 will grab the file. The Google Drive link needs to have "anyone with link" can view permissions. Google Drive files with "restricted" sharing access will not work.

Using the Share Extension

This is the most convenient option for web browsing. When you are in Safari or any other app, you see something you want to listen to later, and you tap the Share button. Choose Listen2 from the share sheet. The article gets imported and will be waiting in your library. No copy-pasting, no switching apps, no typing in URLs.

And if you import a batch of articles throughout the day this way, you can group them into a collection in two taps — see Web Article Collections in the Collections section.

Using Listen2 with Siri

If you have text on your clipboard and want to skip the UI entirely, just say "Read my clipboard in Listen2." It imports the clipboard text and starts playing automatically. Hands-free from start to finish.

Collection Archives

If someone sends you a .listen2collection file — a curated reading list, a course packet, or a set of documents organized into chapters — just open it. The complete collection imports with all its documents and structure intact. Tap the file, and everything lands in your library ready to go.

PDF Extraction (iOS 26+)

On iOS 26 or later, importing a PDF gives you a choice. Standard extraction works the way you would expect — it pulls the text layer out of the PDF. But for complex layouts like multi-column academic papers or documents with unusual formatting, there is AI Vision. This is experimental, and it uses on-device layout analysis to figure out reading order in tricky PDFs. For most documents, Standard is all you need. Sometimes the standard PDF extractor might jumble together tight multicolumn layouts, and the AI Vision extractor may or may not handle this better. It is worth trying both methods if one of them is not importing correctly.

The standard PDF import method is not quite "standard," though. It was built from scratch to handle multi-column research papers, technical books, and just about any PDF you can throw at it. The import is quite slow for large full-sized book PDFs, so leave your phone open and let it finish importing. That is a one-time cost for extracting all the text, filtering out footnotes, other noise, and re-joining hyphenated line breaks that disrupt voice reader prosody.

3. Your Library

Once you start importing documents, you will need to be able to find them again. That is the Library tab — the first thing you see when you open Listen2.

Think of your library as a stack of everything you have brought in, sorted by what you touched most recently. Whatever you were listening to last is sitting right at the top. You do not organize it. You do not file things into folders. It just stays out of your way and keeps the thing you care about most front and center.

Each row in the list shows you what you need at a glance: the document title, a format icon or cover thumbnail, your reading progress as a percentage if you have started it, and how long ago you last opened it. You can tell the difference between "that PDF I was halfway through yesterday" and "that EPUB I have not touched in two weeks" without opening either one.

When your library gets big enough that scrolling feels tedious, there is a search bar at the top. Type the first few characters of a title and the list filters down instantly.

You will also notice a second tab at the top — Collections. That is for curated playlists of documents, and it is covered in detail in Section 8. For now, just know it is there.

To manage your documents, swipe left on any row to delete it. Or press and hold on a document to bring up a context menu — from there you can add it to a collection.

But here is the thing that matters most: Listen2 remembers where you are in every document, not just the last one. You can jump between five different books over the course of a week and each one picks up exactly where you left off. It is the kind of thing you stop noticing because it just works.

4. The Reader

This is the screen you will spend the most time with. Once you open a document and press play, the reader is where everything happens — following along, navigating, adjusting speed, jumping between chapters. It is worth knowing what every button does and the few gestures that make a real difference.

Top Bar

Starting from the left, you have a row of tools that control navigation and discovery.

The back arrow returns you to the Library. The bookmark button drops a bookmark at your current position, or removes one if there is already a bookmark there. Search lets you find text within the document. Table of Contents shows chapters and sections so you can jump straight to the part you care about. The gear icon opens Quick Settings — voice, highlighting, display options — without leaving the reader. And the Go Back button works like a browser's back button: it returns you to wherever you were before your last jump or seek.

Jump to Playback Position

This one deserves its own moment. The crosshairs button (labeled "Jump to Playback Position" in VoiceOver) in the top bar snaps the view back to wherever the voice is currently reading.

Here is when it matters. You are listening to a long chapter and you scroll up to re-read a paragraph you half-caught. Now the voice is reading somewhere off-screen — perhaps two whole pages below where you are looking. Tap the crosshairs button and the view jumps right back to the active line. No hunting, no guessing where playback got to while you were gone.

You will find yourself reaching for this one more than you expect.

The Text

The text area is not just a display — it is interactive.

Tap any paragraph and playback jumps to the start of that paragraph. Useful when you want to skip ahead a couple of paragraphs or rewind without scrubbing through a progress bar.

Double-tap any specific word and playback seeks to exactly that word. Handy when you want to re-hear a tricky passage or start from a specific spot mid-sentence.

Between these two gestures — tap for paragraph, double-tap for word — you can get to any point in a document in about a second. Much faster than dragging a scrubber.

Bottom Bar

The bottom bar handles playback controls and quick adjustments, left to right.

The speed button shows your current rate (like "1.0x") and opens a speed picker when you tap it. Next is the progress bar with a percentage readout so you always know how far through the document you are. The voice picker lets you swap voices on the fly without opening settings. Then the skip back and skip forward buttons jump between paragraphs. And the play/pause button sits right in the center where your thumb expects it.

Collection Context

When you open a document as part of a collection, the reader adds a bit of context at the top — the collection name and your position, something like "Morning Reading - 2 of 5." Extra skip buttons also appear so you can jump forward or backward between documents in the collection without going back to the library. Everything else works the same.

5. Playback

Once you have imported a document and opened it in the reader, it is time to control it. The good news: the controls you will reach for most are extremely simple, and they work even when you are not looking at the screen.

Play and Pause

The big button at the bottom of the reader. Tap it and the voice starts. Tap it again and it stops. But you do not have to be in the app to do this. Lock your screen, switch to another app, pull up Control Center — play and pause work from all of them. Same goes for your AirPods or any headphone remote. One tap to toggle.

Skipping Forward and Back

The skip buttons sit on either side of the play button. By default, they jump by paragraph, which is the right move for most reading. But if you want finer control, you can switch to sentence-level skipping in settings. These also work from the lock screen and headphone remote, so you can rewind a paragraph without pulling your phone out of your pocket.

Speed

Tap the speed button in the bottom bar to open the speed sheet. You can go from 0.5x all the way up to 2.5x, in 0.1x increments. Start at 1.0x. Then bump it up a notch every few sessions. Most people land somewhere around 1.2x to 1.5x for casual reading. For dense or technical material, 1.0x is the right call. There is no badge of honor for listening fast — the goal is comprehension.

Paragraph Pause

This one is subtle, but it matters. There is a configurable gap between paragraphs — from 0.0 seconds up to 1.0 seconds. It gives you a beat to process what you just heard before the next paragraph starts. Think of it like the white space on a printed page. You will find it in settings.

Background Playback and Now Playing

Switch apps, lock your screen, put your phone in your bag. The voice keeps going. Your lock screen shows the document title, current section or chapter name, and cover artwork if the document has it. You always know what is playing at a glance, even without opening Listen2.

6. Highlighting & Auto-Scroll

Reading along while someone talks is surprisingly hard if the words are not visually tracking with the voice. Your eyes lose the spot, you glance away for a second, and suddenly you are scanning the page trying to find where the audio is. Highlighting and auto-scroll solve this together — one shows you which words are being spoken, the other makes sure those words stay on screen.

Highlighting

You have three levels to choose from: Word, Sentence, and Off.

Word is the default, and it is the most precise. Each word lights up the moment it is spoken. Listen2 runs a speech alignment engine entirely on your device to figure out exactly when each word starts and ends. If you do not pay attention to the word highlighting, you may get better battery performance having it set to "sentence" or "off".

Sentence highlights the full sentence being read. Less visual movement, but it still gives you a clear anchor for where the voice is.

Off turns highlighting off entirely. You are just listening.

There is also a line band option — a subtle highlight strip behind the current line. It is only available with Word-level highlighting, and you toggle it independently in settings. Think of it as a reading ruler. If you are following along closely, it gives your eyes one more thing to lock onto.

Note for older devices: on older devices with less available memory, Listen2 automatically caps highlighting at Sentence level to keep things running smoothly. If that applies to your device, you will see a note in settings explaining why Word is not available.

Auto-Scroll

Two modes here: Page-follow and Centered.

Page-follow is the default. You read down the page naturally, and when the highlighted line gets close to the bottom of the screen, the view scrolls forward to keep it visible. It is like reading a book where someone turns the page for you right when you need it.

Centered works differently. It pins the currently spoken line to the middle of the screen. The text flows past you like a teleprompter — your eyes stay in one spot, and the words come to you. Great for study, close reading, or language learning where you want every word front and center.

But here is the important detail. Centered mode requires Word-level highlighting to work. It needs that precise per-word timing to know exactly which line to pin. If you switch highlighting to Sentence or Off, centered mode automatically falls back to Page-follow and shows a brief toast message letting you know what happened. No crash, no confusion — it just gracefully steps down and tells you why.

So when should you use which? Page-follow is the one for casual listening — you glance at the screen now and then, perhaps you are cooking or commuting and checking in occasionally. Centered is for when the screen has your full attention and you want to lock in. Two different modes for two different situations.

Both settings live in Quick Settings, accessible from the gear button in the reader. You can switch between them mid-session without interrupting playback.

7. Voices & Languages

Voices are the heart of the listening experience. A great voice makes a two-hour reading session feel effortless. A poor one makes you quit after three paragraphs. This is worth getting right.

Listen2 ships with one high-quality English voice already installed. No downloads, no setup — you can start listening the moment you open the app. But that is just the starting point.

Voice Engines (new in v1.5.0)

Listen2 now has two voice engines: Piper and Supertonic.

Piper is the original engine — fast, lightweight, and available in dozens of languages. These are the voices you already know. They run well on any device and cover the widest range of languages.

Supertonic is the new high-fidelity engine. It uses a flow-matching neural architecture that produces more natural, expressive speech. Supertonic voices sound closer to human narration — smoother prosody, more natural rhythm, clearer articulation. The models were custom-converted to run natively on Apple's Neural Engine through CoreML, so you get high-fidelity audio without unnecessary battery drain. Supertonic supports English, Spanish, and French, with more languages coming.

Here is the nice part about Supertonic: all its voices share a single engine. Download any Supertonic voice and you get access to all of them — male and female, distinctive styles. The engine download happens once, and after that switching between Supertonic voices is instant.

Both engines work side by side. You can switch between Piper and Supertonic voices freely — even mid-document. The app handles everything behind the scenes.

Browsing Voices

Open the Voice Library from the main settings screen or from your library. You will find dozens of voices spanning English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Vietnamese, and more.

Every voice has a play button right on the row so you can preview it before committing to a download. For Supertonic voices, samples play in whatever language is currently selected — so you can hear how each voice sounds in Spanish or French, not just English. Filter the list by voice engine, language, quality level (high or medium), or download status — all voices, downloaded only, or not yet downloaded. Sort by name, language, or downloaded-first. Between the filters and sorting, you can narrow things down fast even as the library grows.

When multiple voice engines are available, the Sort & Filter sheet includes a Voice Engine filter. Use it to show only Piper voices, only Supertonic voices, or all voices at once.

Downloading & Managing

Tap the download button next to any voice and you will see it move through three phases: downloading, decompressing, and installing. Most voices run 60 to 75 MB each, so Wi-Fi is highly recommended.

To delete a voice, swipe left on it in the Voice Library. The bundled voice cannot be removed — it is your safety net. At the bottom of the library screen there is a storage info section that tells you how many voices you have installed and the total disk space they are using. Handy when you are cleaning house.

And switching voices while you are reading is fast. Tap the voice button in the reader's bottom bar to open the voice picker. It shows all your downloaded voices, filterable by language. Tap one to switch. You can audition voices right from the picker too, so you do not have to leave the reader to find the right fit.

Multi-Speaker Voices

Some voice models pack multiple speakers into a single download. You will spot these by the speaker count badge on the voice row. Tap one and you will see the full speaker list. For voices with more than 20 speakers, there is a searchable speaker browser — type to filter and audition individual speakers without scrolling through a massive list.

This matters more than you would think. Two speakers from the same voice model can sound completely different — one warm and conversational, another crisp and formal. Same underlying engine, completely different feel.

Note that single-speaker voices usually sound better overall than a multi-speaker voice, but this is subjective to each person, so try them both out and see for yourself.

Supertonic Languages (new in v1.5.0)

Supertonic voices are multilingual. The same voice — Luna, Atlas, any of them — can read in English, Spanish, or French. You choose the language once and it applies to all Supertonic voices until you change it.

When a Supertonic voice is active, a language card appears at the top of the Voice Library and in the quick settings voice picker. Tap it to open the language picker. Select a language and the voice switches immediately — the synthesis queue flushes and re-synthesizes from your current position in the new language.

Voice sample previews are language-aware too. When you tap the play button on a Supertonic voice, you hear a sample in whatever language is currently selected. Switch to Spanish, tap play on Luna, and you hear Luna speaking Spanish. This makes it easy to compare how different voices handle a given language before committing.

Custom Voices (new in v1.5.0)

If you have cloned your voice using Supertone Voice Builder, you can import it into Listen2 and use it as a fully functional Supertonic voice.

Open the Voice Library and scroll to the bottom. When the Supertonic engine is installed, you will see an "Import Custom Voice" card. Tap it, and a file picker opens. Select the JSON file exported from Voice Builder. The app validates the file structure, then asks you to name the voice. Type a name — or accept the filename it suggests — and tap Import.

Your custom voice appears in a "Custom Voices" section in the Voice Library, with a "Custom" badge to distinguish it from the built-in voices. It works exactly like any built-in Supertonic voice: same language support, same tuning controls, same quality. Tap it to set it as active, and you will hear your cloned voice reading your documents.

Custom voices also get sample previews. The first time you tap the play button, the app synthesizes a short sample clip on device in the current language. After that first synthesis, playback is instant from cache. Change the language and tap play again — it synthesizes a new sample in the new language.

To remove a custom voice, swipe left on it in the Voice Library and tap Delete. If the deleted voice was active, the app falls back to the first built-in Supertonic voice, or to the bundled Piper voice if the Supertonic engine is not installed.

Language Packs

Non-English voices can optionally download a grammar pack for their language. These adjust parameters such as text normalization — turning things like "1,234" into "one thousand two hundred thirty-four" instead of reading out individual digits. Same for dates, currency, and other formatted text.

If a voice needs a grammar pack, you will see a prompt. Download it, and numbers and dates will sound natural. You can manage these from the Language Packs screen — download, delete, or retry if something went wrong. They are small and make a real difference in how polished the output sounds.

One thing to know: grammar pack coverage varies by language. Most handle numbers, dates, and currency well. Vietnamese normalizes numbers and basic text correctly, but currency symbols (like ₫ or $) and measurement units (km, kg, kWh) currently pass through as-is. The voice will still read the text — it just will not expand "100000 ₫" into words the way it would for other languages. This is on our list to improve.

Voice Tuning

Each engine has its own tuning controls. The settings screen automatically shows the right set based on which voice is active.

Piper Voice Tuning

Two sliders shape how Piper voices sound.

Expressiveness (0.00 to 1.00) controls pitch and tone variation. Set it low and the voice goes flat, almost monotone. Set it high and you get more animated, dynamic delivery. Default is 0.667.

Duration Variation (0.00 to 1.00) controls phoneme timing — how long each sound is held. Low means even, mechanical pacing. High means more natural rhythm with subtle pauses and rushes. Default is 0.80.

Supertonic Voice Quality (new in v1.5.0)

Four parameters let you dial in Supertonic's output.

Articulation Speed (0.70 to 1.30) controls how much time the model allocates per word. Lower values give the model more room to pronounce clearly — words come out more precise, but the natural pace slows down. Higher values speed up articulation but may clip syllables. Default is 0.79.

Duration Buffer (0% to 30%) adds extra time after the model's predicted speech length. This prevents words from being cut off at the end of sentences. If you hear the last word getting clipped, bump this up. Default is 14%.

Quality Steps (10 to 40) controls how many denoising passes the model runs. More steps produce cleaner, more natural audio but take longer to generate. 32 is a good balance between quality and speed. Default is 32.

Variation (0.50 to 1.50) controls how much randomness shapes the audio. Lower values sound smoother and more consistent. Higher values introduce more expressiveness but can also cause the voice to shift accents between sentences. Default is 0.85.

There is a Reset to Defaults button for each engine if you wander too far and want to start over. And if you tweak these settings while audio is already playing, you get a choice: "Apply Now" clears the audio buffer and switches immediately, or "Apply Soon" lets the current audio finish before the new settings kick in.

Voice Presets (new in v1.5.0)

Here is the problem presets solve. You find the perfect tuning for Luna — she sounds crisp and clear at Articulation Speed 0.90 with Quality Steps 28. But then you switch to Atlas for a different book, and those settings come along for the ride. Atlas sounds better with completely different values. Without presets, you are manually adjusting sliders every time you switch voices.

Presets let you save a set of tuning parameters and load them onto any voice. Each voice can have its own settings, independent of every other voice. Change Luna's Articulation Speed and Atlas does not budge.

How it works. By default, all voices share one set of global tuning parameters. When you save or load a preset onto a voice, that voice detaches from the global settings and gets its own copy. The section header tells you the current state — "Global" means the voice is using shared settings, a preset name like "Crisp Narration" means it loaded that preset, and "Custom" means it has its own settings that do not match any preset.

Saving a preset. Open the Presets screen from the tuning section (there is a "Presets" link below "Reset to Defaults"). Tap "Save Current as Preset." The app suggests a name based on the voice — accept it or type your own. Saving captures the current slider values and also detaches the voice, so future slider changes only affect this voice.

Loading a preset. On the Presets screen, tap any saved preset to load it onto the current voice. The sliders update immediately. For Piper voices, you get the same "Apply Now" or "Apply Soon" choice you see when changing sliders.

Using Global Settings. If a voice is detached and you want it to go back to sharing settings with everyone else, tap "Use Global Settings" on the Presets screen. The voice-specific settings are removed and the sliders revert to the global values.

Reset to Defaults still works the same way, with one nuance. If the voice is detached, it resets that voice's settings to factory defaults but keeps it detached. The voice does not rejoin the global pool — it just gets fresh default values of its own. If the voice is using global settings, it resets the global values, which affects all voices that have not been detached.

Presets are filtered by engine. Supertonic presets only appear when a Supertonic voice is active, and Piper presets only appear for Piper voices. Deleting a preset from the library does not affect any voice that already loaded it — the loaded values are a snapshot, not a live link.

Pronunciation Rules (new in v1.4.0)

Sometimes the voice mispronounces a word. A character name, a technical term, an abbreviation. You hear it wrong once and it pulls you out of the listening experience every time after that.

Pronunciation rules let you fix this. You tell the app "when you see this text, say this instead." The displayed text stays exactly the same — only the spoken output changes.

Open pronunciation rules from the quick settings gear icon while reading, or from the main settings screen under Voice. Tap + to create a rule. You will set a match pattern (the text the voice gets wrong), choose whether it should match the exact word or any text containing the pattern, and then tell it what to say instead — or tell it to stay silent and skip the matched text entirely.

A few things that come in handy:

• Fixing names. If the voice says "Kaethe" wrong, create a rule that replaces it with a spelling the voice handles naturally, like "Kahtuh." Write replacements as words the voice can read, not phonetic notation.
• Spelling out abbreviations. For something like "NASA," use periods between letters: "N.A.S.A." — this tells the voice to spell it out letter by letter. Spaces between letters do not work as well.
• Silencing footnotes. The app ships with built-in rules for common footnote markers like [1], [2], and reference symbols like † and §. Toggle them on in the rule list and those markers disappear from the audio without touching the display text.

Rules can be global (apply everywhere) or document-scoped (apply only to a specific document). When you open pronunciation rules from the reader's quick settings, you can create rules scoped to whatever you are currently reading. Document-scoped rules take priority over global ones when both match the same text.

You can toggle rules on and off, reorder them by dragging, and delete any rule you have created. Built-in rules can be toggled but not edited or deleted.

8. Collections

You know the feeling of making a great mixtape. You pick the tracks, put them in the right order, add a little commentary between songs to set the mood. Collections are that, but for reading. You grab a set of documents from your library, arrange them in the order you want, and hit play. Everything plays through front to back — one article flows into the next, with optional narrated intros between them that you write yourself.

Line up your morning commute listening. Build a course reading list. Put together a set of essays for your book club. One tap and the whole thing plays with a little chime between documents.

Creating a Collection

Go to the Collections tab in your library and tap the + button. You will see a menu with two options: "New Collection" for building one from scratch, and "Create Web Article Collection" for a quick shortcut (more on that below). Choose "New Collection" and give it a name. You can optionally add a description and cover artwork from your photo library, but neither is required.

Then add documents. You will see your full library to pick from. Once they are in, drag to reorder them the way you want, swipe to remove anything that does not belong. The collection detail screen shows an item count, a document count, and a play button right at the top.

You can also add documents to an existing collection without leaving your library. Long-press any document and choose "Add to Collection" from the context menu. Quick and easy.

Web Article Collections

Here is the scenario. You are importing articles from Safari throughout the day — one here, one there, perhaps five or six by the evening. Now you want to listen through them on a walk. Normally you would create a collection, add each article one by one, name it, and so on. Web Article Collections skip all that.

Tap the + button on the Collections tab and choose "Create Web Article Collection." The app finds all your loose web articles — the ones you have imported but have not organized into a collection yet — and lets you batch them up in two taps. Pick how many you want (5, 10, 25, or all of them), accept or edit the auto-generated name, and tap Create. The collection builds itself from your most recent articles, newest first, and drops you right into it ready to play.

This is the answer to "I want auto-play across documents" and "I want to clean up when I am done." Collections already auto-advance from one document to the next. Once your articles are in a collection, you press play and the whole batch plays straight through. And when you are finished, delete the collection and choose "Delete Collection and Documents" to clear everything out in one shot.

If you do not have any web articles yet, the sheet walks you through how to import them — open Safari, tap share, choose Listen2. And if all your web articles are already in collections, it tells you that too.

Intros & Citations

Between any two documents, you can add an intro — a short text segment you write yourself that gets read aloud as a transition. Think of it as the little commentary between tracks on a good radio station. Something like "This next piece is from 1962, when the author was living in Paris..." or even just a sentence of context about what is coming next and why you included it.

Intros show up as expandable items in the collection detail view, each with their own play button. They get narrated by your current voice just like any other text. When you play through a collection, intros play automatically between documents. No extra taps.

For each document in a collection, you can also add source citations — a title and URL pair. Handy for attributing web articles, linking back to the original publication, or giving your reading club members a way to find the source material.

Playing a Collection

Tap Play on the collection detail screen and it starts from the top. If you have already been listening, it picks up at the first document you have not finished. Progress badges appear on each item: not started, in-progress with a percentage, or done. You always know where you left off.

Inside the reader, the top bar shows the collection name and your position — something like "Morning Reading - 3 of 7." Extra skip buttons appear on either side of the standard controls so you can jump forward or backward between documents in the collection. Skip buttons jump between documents only, not intros. Intros play automatically as transitions when you reach them.

Everything else in the reader works exactly the same. Same speed controls, same highlighting, same playback gestures. The collection just adds that extra layer of structure around it.

Sharing & Importing

Tap the export button in the toolbar on a collection's detail screen. Listen2 packages everything up — documents, intros, structure, the works — into a .listen2collection file. Share it via AirDrop, Messages, email, or however you prefer. The recipient opens it in Listen2 and gets the whole collection intact, ready to play.

Importing works the other direction. Open a .listen2collection file from Files, a link, or another app and Listen2 handles it. If you already have that collection, it lets you know.

Deleting a Collection

Swipe left on a collection in the list and tap delete. You will get a choice: "Delete Collection Only" or "Delete Collection and Documents."

The first option removes the collection but leaves every document in your library. The structure goes away, but the content stays. The second option removes the collection and deletes the documents along with it — handy when you have finished a batch of articles and want a clean slate.

Here is the safety net: if a document belongs to another collection too, it will not be deleted. Only documents that are exclusively in the collection you are removing get cleaned up. You cannot accidentally lose something that is still part of another playlist.

9. Text Display

You are going to be staring at this text for a while — hours, potentially. It should look the way you want it to look — the right font, the right size, the right amount of breathing room between lines. Listen2 gives you real control over all of this, and it is worth spending a minute dialing it in.

Fonts

Thirteen fonts across four categories. In the font picker, each font name is rendered in its own typeface, so you can see exactly what you are choosing before you tap.

Serif fonts tend to feel more like a printed book. Sans-serif fonts feel cleaner and more modern. And the two accessibility fonts are there for a reason — OpenDyslexic is designed to reduce letter-swapping for readers with dyslexia, and Atkinson Hyperlegible maximizes the visual distinction between similar-looking characters for low-vision readers. They are not afterthoughts tucked in a submenu. They are right there in the picker alongside everything else.

Size

A slider that runs from 10pt to 40pt. Drag it until the text feels right. But there is also a "Use System Text Size" toggle — flip that on and Listen2 follows whatever you have set in iOS Settings under Display & Text Size, including the larger accessibility sizes. If you have already configured your whole phone for bigger text, Listen2 picks that up automatically. No extra work.

Spacing

Two settings here: line spacing and character spacing.

Line spacing has five levels — Compact (1.0x, lines right on top of each other), Normal (1.25x, the default), Relaxed (1.5x), Spacious (1.75x), and Very Spacious (2.0x). More space between lines means your eyes have an easier time tracking from the end of one line to the start of the next. That matters more than most people realize, especially during long sessions.

Character spacing also has five levels — Default (0%), Slight (5%), Medium (10%), Wide (15%), and Very Wide (20%). This spreads the letters apart within each word. Wider spacing can make a noticeable difference for readability, particularly for readers with dyslexia where tightly packed letters tend to blur together.

Line Length

On an iPad in landscape, a line of text can stretch all the way across the screen. That is exhausting to read — your eyes have to travel too far from the end of one line to find the start of the next. The Characters Per Line setting constrains the text column width so lines stay a comfortable length.

You get separate sliders for portrait and landscape orientation because what works in one does not always work in the other. As you adjust, a green indicator appears when you are in the 50–75 character range — that is the sweet spot that reading research consistently points to as easiest on the eyes.

This is enabled by default on iPad, where it matters most. On iPhone the screen is already narrow enough that lines do not stretch uncomfortably, so it is off by default. But you can turn it on for either device if you want the control.

10. Bookmarks & Search

You are listening to a long essay, and the author drops a paragraph that completely reframes everything you thought about the topic. Or you are working through a textbook and need to flag three definitions across different chapters. Or you just want to jump back to that one scene in chapter twelve. Listen2 gives you three tools for finding your way around a document: bookmarks, search, and the table of contents.

Bookmarks

First, the distinction that matters most. Listen2 automatically saves your reading position every time you pause or leave. You never need to do anything to pick up where you left off. Bookmarks are a separate thing entirely — they are for marking specific spots you choose to come back to.

Tap the bookmark button in the reader's top bar to drop a bookmark at your current position. Tap it again to remove it. You can have as many bookmarks as you want in a single document — mark a passage you loved, a key argument, a reference you will need again.

To see all your bookmarks, tap the Table of Contents button in the top bar and switch to the Bookmarks tab. Each bookmark shows a snippet of the text at that position and how far through the document it sits. Tap one to jump straight there. Swipe left to delete it.

And if you re-import a document or its text changes, Listen2 detects that your bookmarks may have shifted. You will see a warning banner with your options: search manually for the passage using the text snippet shown, or remove the stale bookmark.

Search

Tap the magnifying glass icon in the reader's top bar. Type at least three characters and results appear as a list, each showing the matching text with surrounding context and the chapter or section it belongs to. Tap any result to jump directly to that spot in the document. No complex query syntax, no settings to fiddle with — just type what you are looking for and go.

Table of Contents

Tap the Table of Contents button in the reader's top bar. For documents with chapters or sections — EPUBs, structured PDFs — you get a hierarchical list of all chapters and sub-sections. The section you are currently in has a checkmark so you can orient yourself at a glance.

If the document has a lot of entries, a search bar appears at the top to filter the list down. Tap any entry to jump to that chapter.

Note on plain text and clipboard imports: plain text files and clipboard imports will not have a table of contents. There is no structural chapter data to build one from. Bookmarks and search still work fine for those documents.

11. Accessibility

A text-to-speech app is, by definition, an accessibility tool. It takes text and turns it into audio. Accessibility here is not a feature that was tacked on after the fact — it is the whole premise. Every screen, every button, every interaction was designed to work with VoiceOver and other assistive technologies from the start.

VoiceOver

Every button has a descriptive label and hint. Interactive elements use appropriate traits — adjustable for sliders, selected for active states, header for section titles. None of this is generic placeholder text. Each label tells you what the control does, and each hint tells you what happens when you use it.

Rotor actions show up where they add value. In the Voice Library, you can Play Sample or Stop Sample directly from the rotor without hunting for buttons. In lists, delete is available as a custom action. These are the kinds of things that make the difference between an app that technically works with VoiceOver and one that feels good to use with it.

The reader deserves a special mention. When you explore the reading area with your finger, auto-scrolling pauses so the text stays still while you move through it. And if you lose your place, the "Jump to Playback Position" button (visually, this button looks like crosshairs) brings the current reading line back into view. Navigate the top and bottom bars like any standard toolbar: swipe through controls, double-tap to activate.

Each earlier section of this guide includes a VoiceOver callout covering that specific screen's interactions. If you are looking for how VoiceOver works on a particular screen, check that section first.

Accessible Fonts

Two fonts designed specifically for readability, right alongside every other font in the picker:

OpenDyslexic uses weighted letterforms — heavier at the bottom — to reduce the letter-swapping and rotation that can happen for readers with dyslexia. Letters stay anchored on the page.

Atkinson Hyperlegible was designed by the Braille Institute to maximize the visual distinction between similar characters. The difference between l, 1, and I is obvious. Same for 0 and O. Built for low-vision readers, but plenty of people find it easier to read in general.

Dynamic Type

Toggle "Use System Text Size" in text display settings and Listen2 follows your iOS text size preference. That includes all the larger accessibility size categories. Whatever you have configured system-wide carries straight through — no extra setup.

Spacing

Line spacing goes up to 2.0x and character spacing up to 20%. Both meet or exceed WCAG guidelines for text spacing. But you do not need an accessibility reason to use them. Wider spacing reduces eye strain during long reading sessions for everyone. Sliders support VoiceOver adjustable actions — swipe up to increase, swipe down to decrease.

12. Tips, Troubleshooting & Support

Now that you have explored everything the app can do, here is the quick-reference card — practical advice, common fixes, and where to go if something does not work right.

Best Practices

If word-level highlighting feels too busy, switch to sentence highlighting. You still get a visual anchor tracking your position, but it is calmer. Less movement on the screen.

On iPad, check the line length setting. Without it, text stretches edge to edge on a 12.9-inch screen and your eyes have to travel a long distance to reach the next line. Constraining the width makes a real difference for longer reading sessions.

Trial & Purchase

If you reinstall the app or switch to a new device, go to Settings and tap "Restore Purchases." Your purchase is tied to your Apple ID, so it comes right back. No receipt to dig up, no code to enter.

Common Issues

Voice sounds choppy or delayed. Close other apps to free up memory. If you are using word-level highlighting, try switching to sentence-level — it uses less processing power. Restarting the app can help too. On older devices, this makes the biggest difference.

Document will not import. First, check the format. Listen2 supports PDF, EPUB, DOCX, TXT, MD, and DAISY. If a format should work but is not loading, try a different import method — "Import from Link" instead of the Share Extension, or vice versa.

Supertonic voice skips or clips words. If a Supertonic voice occasionally swallows the end of a word or rushes through a phrase, try increasing the Duration Buffer in Voice Quality settings. The default values (Articulation Speed 0.79, Duration Buffer 14%) are tuned to minimize this, but some text patterns — especially long technical words or unusual names — benefit from a bit more room. Bumping Duration Buffer to 20% or lowering Articulation Speed to 0.75 can help.

Supertonic voice switches between accents. You might notice a Supertonic voice drifting between British and American accents within the same document. This is a known characteristic of the underlying model — the voice learned from a mix of accent styles, and certain text patterns can push it toward one or the other. Lowering the Variation slider in Voice Quality settings can help stabilize the accent. This is something we are actively working to improve.

Highlighting seems out of sync. This can happen with unusual formatting or at very fast speech rates. The audio itself is still correct — it is only the visual tracking that may drift. Switching to sentence-level highlighting smooths it out.

Voice keeps mispronouncing a word. Create a pronunciation rule. Go to quick settings (gear icon) while reading, tap Pronunciation Rules, and add a rule for that word. The trick is writing the replacement as a natural word the voice can read — not phonetic notation. For abbreviations, use periods between letters (N.A.S.A.) instead of spaces.

Non-English voice mispronouncing numbers or dates. Download the language pack for that voice's language. Go to the Voice Library, then Language Packs. These grammar packs teach the voice how to expand numbers, dates, and currency into proper spoken words. English has one built in, but other languages need the download.

Missing Table of Contents. Not all documents have chapter structure. Plain text files, clipboard imports, and some PDFs will not have a TOC. EPUBs almost always do. This is not a bug — there is simply no chapter data to work with.

Getting Help

If something is not covered here, reach out. In the app, go to Settings and tap Contact Support. That opens a pre-filled email with your device model and iOS version already included, so you do not have to look any of that up.

You can also email directly: support@moonquakemedia.com

And if you are enjoying Listen2, a review on the App Store goes a long way. It helps other people find the app. That is the single best thing you can do to support it.