About Tempo

Tempo Reader

Open a PDF, a Word file, an EPUB, a PowerPoint deck, a web page or a photo of a page, and read it three ways: Flash, one word at a time on a line your eye can rest on; Listen, in a natural voice made on your device; and Text, the clean document with its figures in place. Everything happens on the device.

See what it does

The subscription

• Importing and your library are free. Reading needs Tempo Pro, which costs CA$3.99 a month or CA$24.99 a year. The App Store shows the price in your own currency.
• To cancel, or to switch between monthly and yearly, open the Settings app, tap your name, then Subscriptions. Turn off auto-renew at least 24 hours before the period ends.
• Bought it on another iPhone or iPad? Tap Restore Purchases on the paywall, or in Tempo's own Settings.
• Apple takes the payment, so refunds are Apple's too: ask at reportaproblem.apple.com.

Voices

• Tempo Neural is five English voices made on your device: Heart, Bella, Nicole, Michael and Fenrir. They arrive with the app, and Heart is the one you start with.
• They need an iPhone or iPad with 6 GB of memory or more. On other devices, in a document that isn't English, or at a speed too fast for them, Listen reads in your Apple voice and says so in a line under the player.
• You can remove the voices, and add them again, in Settings, under Listen & Voices.

What it reads

PDF, Word (.docx), PowerPoint (.pptx), EPUB, plain text, Markdown, web pages, and photographs of printed pages. Share a file to Tempo from any app, or open one from Files. Scanned pages are read with on-device text recognition, and Tempo tells you which pages it had to read that way. If it can't read a file, it says why.

Privacy

Tempo Reader collects no data. There is no account, no analytics and no tracking, and your documents never leave your device.

Read Tempo Reader's privacy policy

Getting help

Email us and say which device and which version of iOS or iPadOS you're using. We read every message.

Email: info@ciav.ca

Tempo on the web

Tempo runs on one Mac in Winnipeg. Nothing you upload goes anywhere else.

Give it a document and Tempo gets you through it faster than a page allows. Flash shows the text one word at a time on a fixed point, so your eyes stop moving. Listen reads it aloud in a natural voice while the words follow along. Text is the clean document itself, for skimming and for checking the machine's work.

Where the web reader runs

Apple Vision reads photos and scans. Kokoro speaks the words. Both run on that one Mac — there's no cloud OCR, no cloud text-to-speech, and no metered service anywhere in the path. The only thing that leaves the Mac is the page in front of you, sent straight to your browser.

Library and sharing on the web

Tempo keeps a library on that Mac, opened with an invite code so it isn't public. Every document also gets its own link: anyone who has it can read the document, listen to it and keep it in their own library, without the code. Only the person who added a document can rename, edit or delete it.