Listen to everything you meant to read.
Inkto reads your documents aloud — PDFs, Word files, EPUB, web pages, even a page you photograph — and marks the word you are hearing while you hear it.
The word you are hearing is the word you are seeing. That is the whole idea, and everything else in this app is in service of it.
Android now. iPhone and iPad shortly.
How it works
Bring in a document. Press play.
The text is pulled out in reading order first — columns untangled, headers and footers dropped, words rejoined where the page broke them in half.
Import
Choose a file, share one in from another app, or point the camera at a page.
Press play
It reads a sentence at a time, in a voice you pick, at a speed you set.
Come back later
Your place is kept, on every device you sign in on.
Reading
You can look away and find your place again.
Most readers leave you to guess where the voice has got to. This one shows you, three ways at once, so a glance is enough.
The word, as it is spoken
The sentence is banded and the spoken word is marked inside it — fill, colour and a rule on the baseline, so it still reads in greyscale.
The original pages
For a PDF, switch to the real pages and watch the highlight move across the publisher's own layout, diagrams and all.
Chapters
Headings are read out of the document, so a six-hundred-page book is navigable instead of one endless scrubber.
Read from here
Tap any sentence on the page and the voice picks it up from there.
Voices
The voice runs on your phone.
Speech is produced by your own device rather than shipped to a voice company and streamed back. That is why it keeps working on a plane, and why your documents are not read by a third party in order to be read to you.
Every voice your device has
Named and listed, with the ones that need no connection marked as such.
Speed that holds
From a half to four times, set once and kept — including a gentle ramp if you like to start slow and settle faster.
Many languages
Whatever your device speaks, Inkto speaks — the sentence splitter handles scripts without spaces, and reads right-to-left text in the right order.
Lock screen and headphones
Play, pause and skip from the lock screen, the car, or the button on your headphones.
Paper
Photograph a page and listen to it.
A letter, a form, a page of a book you own. The camera straightens the page, reads the text off it, and hands it to the same player as everything else — same highlight, same voice, same place-keeping.
Books
Two books a month, yours to keep.
Every account gets two books a month, on a free plan or a paid one. Keep means keep: they stay in your library whether or not you are still paying, because taking back a book someone has started is the kind of thing nobody should discover at cancellation.
This month's two
A fresh pair on the first of the month, claimed from a catalogue of classics.
Or bring your own
Your own files are never counted against anything. Import as many as you like.
Progress
What you actually got through.
Minutes listened, words heard, pages covered, and a streak that counts days you read rather than days you opened the app. Seven days at a glance, and the honest total underneath.
Pricing
Free until January.
Plans start in January. Until then Inkto is free for everyone — there is nothing to buy, nothing to enter a card for, and nothing to cancel. These are the prices it will cost when plans open, so you can decide now rather than find out later.
1 month
$4 Free
Then $4 a month
3 months
$7.50 Free
Then $7.50, which is $2.50 a month
12 months
$18 Free
Then $18, which is $1.50 a month
What "free until January" means
The whole app, for everyone, with no daily limit: every voice, as many of your own documents as you like, and two books a month to keep. It is not a trial and not a subscription given away — plans simply do not open until January, and nothing is charged before then.
Prices in US dollars, and real ones: the struck figure is what each term will cost from January, not an invented discount. A longer term is cheaper per month and the page says by how much.
Privacy
No ads. No tracking. Nothing sold.
There is no advertising identifier in this app and no analytics software of any kind. Your documents are stored so your library can follow you between devices, and for no other purpose — they are not read for advertising and not used to train anything.
Speech stays on the device
Your text is not sent to a third-party voice service to be spoken.
Leave with everything
Export your data, or delete your account and all of it, from inside the app or by email.
Questions
Reasonable things to ask.
What can it read?
PDF, Word (.docx), EPUB and plain text, plus pages you photograph with the camera. A scanned PDF with no text layer is read by recognising the text on the page.
Does it work without a connection?
A document you have already opened plays offline, in any voice your device holds locally. Importing something new needs a connection, because the text is extracted on our side.
Do you read my documents?
No. They are stored so your library and your place in it follow you between devices. Nobody reads them, and nothing is trained on them.
How do I cancel or delete my account?
Account, then Delete account — or email us and we will do it. Everything goes: the documents, the text we extracted, your positions and your statistics.
Who makes it?
One developer, Ravpartap Singh. Write to inkto.ai@gmail.com and a person answers.
Start with the thing that has been open in a tab for a week.
Android now. iPhone and iPad shortly.