Comparison
Two apps that turn reading into listening, built on opposite ideas. Speechify sends your text to a server and charges a subscription for the good voices. Timber does the listening on your iPhone and gives you 324 voices without an account. Here is the honest version, including the parts where Speechify wins.
† Speechify figures read from their own pricing page on 20 September 2026
Timber: on your iPhone. The speech is generated on the device, so it works on a plane and nothing is uploaded to be read.
Speechify: in the cloud. Your text goes to their servers to be turned into audio.
Timber: nothing, and no account. 324 voices across 71 languages are included. Extra features are an optional one-time or subscription purchase.
Speechify: a free tier with 10 voices their own page describes as “robotic sounding”, capped at 1.5x speed. Premium is $29 a month billed monthly, or less billed yearly.
Timber: 324 without paying, in 71 languages, counting Apple’s own voices, plus your Apple Personal Voice.
Speechify: 10 on the free tier, over 1000 in 60+ languages on Premium.
Timber: 0.5x to 1.25x free, and the full 0.3x to 3x with Pro. The slow end is as useful as the fast end for anyone learning a language or following a hard page.
Speechify: 1.5x on free, up to 5x on Premium.
Timber: whole webpages, PDFs including scanned ones, EPUB books, Word and PowerPoint files, a photo of a printed page, RSS feeds, Project Gutenberg, and every tab open in your browser.
Speechify: webpages, PDFs, docs, and a Scan & Listen camera mode on Premium, plus Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive.
Timber: iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. iOS 18 and later. No Android, no web version.
Speechify: iOS, Android, Chrome, and the web.
Timber: mark passages while you listen and hand out what you marked as a worksheet, with MLA and APA citations built in. Repeating headers and footers in a scanned chapter can be silenced across the whole document in one tap.
Speechify: AI summaries and a chat assistant on Premium.
A comparison page that only flatters its own product is an advertisement. These are real:
Android, Chrome and the web. Timber is Apple only, and that is unlikely to change soon.
Summaries, a chat assistant you can ask about a document, and generated podcasts. Timber has an on-device summary and nothing else of that kind.
A server with no battery or memory budget can run larger models than a phone can. Timber’s voices are good and they are getting better, but this is a real trade and it is worth hearing both before you decide.
The honest summary: Speechify is a cloud AI product that also reads aloud. Timber is a reader that happens to need no one’s permission, no one’s server, and no one’s subscription to do the reading.
It takes about a minute and costs nothing to find out which one you like listening to.