Introducing Yomite — an offline Japanese TTS reader
Today we're launching Yomite for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Japanese character voices, all running 100% on-device. No cloud, no API keys, no upload.
Update Oct 2026: Yomite on iOS today (v2.1.2) has 315+ Japanese voices and reads 32 content languages, with its own on-device voice engines for 9 of them. Every on-device voice is free, and you can listen free for up to 20 minutes a day (15 minutes plus 5 from the daily check-in). Premium is optional: ¥480 a month, ¥3,600 a year with a 7-day free trial, or a ¥9,800 lifetime purchase. See the App Store for current pricing. The Android version is on Google Play. The post below is the original launch announcement (Yomite 1.0 reached the App Store on June 9, 2026, UTC).
Today we’re launching Yomite for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. It’s a Japanese text-to-speech reader that runs character voices entirely on Apple Silicon devices — no cloud, no API keys, no upload.
Related use case: Premium plans
Why we built it
Reading time keeps shrinking. We wanted to give people a different angle of access to books — by ear, on the move, during chores, while resting tired eyes.
Audiobooks are great, but their catalogues are limited. Meanwhile, Aozora Bunko hosts thousands of Japanese literary classics for free, EPUB stores carry millions more, and the web publishes endless long-form articles every day. If listening to all of that worked well, reading time would dramatically expand.
To make this work, we needed two things: a natural Japanese voice, and a privacy model that doesn’t ship text to a server. So we built both.
What it does
Read EPUB, Aozora Bunko, and web articles aloud. Drop in a local EPUB for chapter-by-chapter playback. Open Aozora Bunko in the in-app browser and add classics to your library. Paste a URL — the built-in article extractor pulls the body text only.
Character voices. Cool 凛音エル, friendly 桜音, whispering 天深シノ, baritone 阿井田 茂, and more. Several voices ship with up to 7 emotion styles (normal, sad, whisper, shout, etc).
Fully on-device. Speech synthesis never leaves your device (as of October 2026, every voice is built into the app). With iCloud sync on, your library syncs only to your own iCloud. Every speech-synthesis inference runs locally.
Lock screen and Live Activity. Doing chores, drifting to sleep, or on the move — control playback from the lock screen, and see what is playing in the Live Activity (Dynamic Island).
Why offline
Cloud TTS comes with costs, latency, and privacy compromises. We chose on-device inference to dodge all three.
- Text is never sent anywhere to be voiced. Reading history is yours (if you turn on iCloud sync, it goes to your own iCloud).
- Works offline. Subway, airplane, dead-zone — no playback interruption.
- No metered cloud cost. Speech is synthesized on your device, so there is no cloud usage fee (for current plans, see the Oct 2026 update at the top and pricing).
System requirements
- iPhone (A12 Bionic or newer) — iPhone XS / XR / SE2 onward
- iPad (A12 or newer) — iPad mini 5, iPad 8, iPad Air 3 onward
- Mac (M1 or newer)
- iOS 17 / iPadOS 17 / macOS 14 or later
Older A11-and-below devices can’t reach real-time inference speeds for v1.
What’s next
v1.0.0 is launch beta. We’re already planning:
- m4a / WAV export for narration creators
- Android version — now on Google Play (added Oct 2026)
- Additional voices — including possible collaborations with voice actors and ボイスモデル creators
- Chapter-level audio caching to make offline listening even smoother
Feedback and feature requests: [email protected].
Happy listening.
— The Yomite Team
Related: Why Yomite’s Speech Synthesis Runs Entirely On-Device · Free vs Premium — How Much of Yomite Is Actually Free?