Orate - Listen to your documents

Wouldn’t it be great if you could effectively combine activities like reading a long document and walking the dog, or reviewing the latest draft of your business correspondence while you were preparing dinner?

Orate, sistnt’s newest privacy-first app, allows you to transform long text documents into audio that you can listen to like a podcast.

Orate follows the sistnt design philosophy of privacy-first, all on-device processing, making it ideal for personal correspondence and sensitive data that you don’t want to share with online service providers over the internet.

What it does:

• Privately converts nearly any length of text to spoken audio you can control like a podcast
• Accepts PDF and Word documents and URLs from webpages
• Also accepts text (.txt), rich-text (.rtf) and markdown (.md) files
• Choose from freely available text-to-speech voices supplied by Apple
• Quickly navigate between sections of structured text using chapter navigation
• Curate your library of episodes with artwork, notes, or to re-listen to later
• Works offline because all processing happens on device

What it doesn’t do:

• Send your data anywhere. Processing happens on your device using iOS’s built-in text-to-speech
• Require a subscription. Try it for free for 3 episodes. Unlock it for unlimited episodes. It’s yours forever
• Orate can read web pages but cannot automatically bypass website paywalls

Upload your PDFs, Word docs, and even paste text directly into Orate to have it converted into a listenable episode. Paste the URL of a web page and Orate will turn it into audio you can listen to while you do other things.

Playback controls are easy and intuitive if you’ve used any popular podcast player. You can change the playback speed, scrub the timeline to get to any point you want, or skip forward and rewind as needed. You can follow along the transcribed text or you can just sit back and relax while the episode plays in the background on your phone’s lock screen. If your source document supports headings and chapters, you can keep those for quick navigation.

Orate uses text-to-speech voice models that are freely available on any iOS device direct from Apple, although we highly recommend downloading and using only the enhanced and premium voice models (again available for free) for the best results (unless you really enjoy the sound of 1990s-era voice synthesis).

Orate lets you grab those long documents you haven’t had time to read and listen to them while you’re out walking the dog, at the gym, driving, cycling or running. The simplicity of a podcast player, but it’s your content that you want to read. Manage your privacy and security knowing that no one but you will have access to the document or the audio unless you share it.

The world is full of valuable content that you need to get through - Orate lets you listen to your docs on the go.

Orate is available now on the App Store.