Unison Reader is on the App Store
A lot of us buy the books we love twice. Once to read at night, once to hear on the drive or the walk or while the dishes get done. Then the two never meet. The audiobook doesn't know you read three chapters last night, and the ebook doesn't know where the narrator left you this morning.
Unison Reader puts them back together. It's out today on the App Store for iPhone.
How it works
Add the ebook and the audiobook you already own, from Files or from your library server. Unison Reader listens to the narrator on your iPhone and finds every sentence of the book in the recording, a chapter ahead of where you are.
Then it's one book. Tap Listen and the narrator starts on the sentence you were reading, with the words lighting up as they're spoken. Tap Stop and you're reading again, on the sentence the voice stopped on. The narrator's recording is played exactly as it came. Nothing is cut, re-encoded or uploaded.
If you only have one
Pairing is the point, but you don't need both. Bring just an ebook and a natural voice made on your iPhone reads it to you. Bring just an audiobook and Unison Reader makes the text from the narration, so you can read along.
Private by design
There's no account and no server of ours. Listening to the narrator, lining up the text and the generated voice all run on your iPhone. Your library syncs only through your own iCloud, if you use it, and the App Store lists the app as Data Not Collected.
What it costs
Unison Reader is free to download and read. Listening is free for your first hour on each device. After that, a one-time $4.99 unlocks it for good, with Family Sharing. There's no subscription.
What's next
Unison Reader 1.0 is for iPhone and reads English. It opens DRM-free books, which includes the classics: there's a Project Gutenberg catalog built in, if you want to try it before bringing your own. If something doesn't line up, or you want to tell us what to build next, write to support@magratheasoftware.com. We read everything.
If you're curious how the matching works under the hood, we wrote it up for developers: Aligning an audiobook to an ebook on iPhone with SpeechAnalyzer.
