Lectern reads your documents aloud with natural voices that run entirely on your iPhone, made by Faba Development / Luke Fairbanks.
For anything not answered below, email luke_fairbanks@icloud.com with “Lectern” in the subject. Please say which iPhone and iOS version you are on, and what you were doing when the problem happened. Do not send passwords or payment details.
PDF (including scanned PDFs), EPUB, Word (.docx), plain text, Markdown, RTF, photos of pages, and pasted text. Use the + button in the library, the share sheet from Files or Safari, or Scan Pages for printed text.
No. The voices are built into the app. Only purchases use the network.
It should not. Lectern keeps playing in the background and shows controls on the lock screen. If it stops, check that Lectern has not been force-quit from the app switcher, that Low Power Mode is not restricting background activity, and that another app has not taken over audio.
Lectern saves your position every few seconds and whenever you pause. The library shows how far you are in every document, and “Continue listening” picks up where you left off, to the sentence.
Two studio voices are free. The rest, along with whole books past the free preview, an unlimited library, and audio export, come with Lectern Pro. Tap the voice to hear a preview before deciding.
In iOS Settings › your name › Subscriptions. Lectern Pro is billed by Apple, so we cannot cancel it for you. The Lifetime option is a one-time purchase with nothing to cancel.
Open Lectern, go to Settings › Restore Purchases, signed into the same Apple Account you bought with.
Some PDFs are pictures of pages rather than text. Lectern recognizes text in scanned PDFs on the device, but very low-resolution scans or handwriting may not be readable. Try Scan Pages with the camera for a printed original.