Welcome to Readible

Readible turns the things you read into things you can listen to. Articles, books, PDFs, your own notes, and the Kindle books you already own.

This is not a screenshot or a video tour. It is a real article, open in the real reader. Everything described here is something you can try right now, on this page, as you read it.

Start by pressing play

Find the play button at the bottom of the screen and press it. A voice starts reading, and the sentence being spoken lights up as it goes. Look out of the window, look back, and you will know exactly where you are.

Press play now, and watch this paragraph light up one sentence at a time. Quoted passages like this one are set in italics with a line down the side, so you can tell a quote from the writing around it.

You do not need to keep the screen on. Lock the phone and the reading carries on, with the usual controls waiting on your lock screen.

Choose how it sounds

Open the speech settings and you will find two families of voices. Local voices live on your device and work with no connection at all, which makes them useful on a plane or underground. Cloud voices need the internet, and sound much closer to a person reading to you.

Speed runs from half speed up to three times speed. Most people settle a little above normal talking pace in the first week, then quietly creep upwards from there.

Make the page yours

The reader settings change how this page looks while it reads to you:

• Six themes, called Light, Dark, Sepia, Night, Paper and Forest.
• Nine fonts, from plain and modern to properly bookish.
• Text size and screen brightness, each on its own slider.
• A highlight colour, and a choice between lighting up one sentence at a time or the whole paragraph.

Change whatever you like. The reader remembers your choices for every article after this one.

Two gestures worth learning

A single tap anywhere shows and hides the controls. Tap once to bring up the toolbars, tap again for a clean page with nothing on it but the words.

Swipe sideways across any paragraph and the voice jumps to that exact spot and starts reading. Try it on the first line of this page. It is the fastest way to move around, and it works from the middle of a paragraph, not only from the beginning.

Where to go from here

Tap once to show the toolbar, then press the button marked Next at the bottom of the screen. The chapter after this one is about getting your own reading into the app.