ReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio
I'm launching something that started as a side project publicly today: ReadToMe, which is an iPhone app that turns paper books and other printed text into audio. Originally this was a Christmas present for my fiancée, who loves books but has an eye problem that makes it hard for her to read more than a few pages at a time. She mostly listens to audiobooks while following along with the paper book, but some books aren't available in audiobook or even e-book form, and all of the existing apps we tried were surprisingly bad at scanning paper books into audio — they make lots of mistakes,…
In plain words
ReadToMe is an iPhone app that converts printed books and text into audio by using the device's camera to scan pages. Built to help readers with visual difficulties access physical books that lack audiobook versions, the app uses AI to accurately transcribe text while filtering out page numbers and footnotes that degrade listening quality. It enables users to follow along with paper books while hearing them read aloud.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
I'm launching something that started as a side project publicly today: ReadToMe, which is an iPhone app that turns paper books and other printed text into audio. Originally this was a Christmas present for my fiancée, who loves books but has an eye problem that makes it hard for her to read more than a few pages at a time. She mostly listens to audiobooks while following along with the paper book, but some books aren't available in audiobook or even e-book form, and all of the existing apps we tried were surprisingly bad at scanning paper books into audio — they make lots of mistakes, include footnotes and page numbers, etc., in a way that really degrades the experience. Being an AI-oriented engineer by training, I had a crack at solving the problem myself, and was pleasantly surprised at how well the proof of concept worked. I then had some time free while shutting down my previous company (Mezli, YC W21), during which I polished up the app to the point you see it at now. The way it works: On the front end, it's a SwiftUI app (mostly written by ChatGPT!) that consists mostly of a document scanner (VNDocumentCameraViewController) and a custom-built audio player. The back end is more complex — book photos are first sent to an OCR API, then some custom code I wrote does a first pass at stitching together and correcting the results. Then, the corrected OCR results are sent to GPT-3.5-turbo for further post-processing and re-stitching together, and finally to a text-to-speech API for conversion to audio. The hardest part of this process was actually getting the GPT calls right — I ended up writing a custom LLM eval framework for making sure the LLM wasn't making edits relative to the true text of the book. A few issues remain, which I'll work on fixing if the app gets a significant amount of traction, including: 1) It can take multiple minutes to get audio back from a scan, especially if it's on the longer side (10+ pages). I'll be able to bring this down by spinning up dedicated servers for the OCR and TTS back-end. 2) The LLM sometimes does TOO good of a job at correcting "mistakes" in book text. This issue crops up particularly often when an author deliberately uses improper grammar, e.g. in dialogue. The app is priced at $9.99/month for up to 250 pages/month right now, which I estimate will just about cover the costs of API calls. I'll be bringing the price point down as the pricing of the required AI APIs comes down. There's also a 3-day free trial if you want to try it out. If you do find this useful, or know somebody who might, I'd appreciate you giving it a try or letting them know! And please let me know if you have any feedback, including issues or feature requests.
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