Cast
Cast support
Last updated 5 October 2026.
Cast performs books with a narrator and separate voices for the characters. It holds 61 books from the Carrier Press shelf, and it performs EPUB files of your own that you add. Books play on your phone, with no signal.
How the voices work
Each book is worked through to find who is speaking on every line. When you press Play, Cast gives the narrator and each main character a voice of their own, and keeps that casting the same every time you open the book, so you can learn who is who.
The voices are generated on your phone. They are not recordings of human narrators, and the book text is never sent anywhere to be read aloud.
Natural voices and the narrator
Tap Voices at the top of the shelf. Natural voices are the most lifelike. They need one download of about 130 MB, best done on Wi-Fi, and after that they work offline. Until the download finishes, books play in the iPhone's own voices.
Under Narrator, tap Hear on any voice to try it, then tap the voice to choose it. The narrator reads everything that is not dialogue; characters keep their own voices. A new narrator applies the next time you open a book.
If you prefer the iPhone's own voices, choose iPhone voices. Apple offers larger, more natural Enhanced and Premium voices as free downloads under Settings, Accessibility, Spoken Content, Voices, and Cast prefers them when they are installed.
Why some books read in one voice
Every title on the shelf shows how many voices it uses, how many chapters it has, and what share of its dialogue is spoken in character voices. A line is read in a character's voice only when the text makes clear who says it: a speech tag, the person acting in that paragraph, or a back and forth between two people with nobody else in the room. Anything less sure is read by the narrator, because guessing would put the wrong voice on the wrong person. A book written with few speech tags, or with little dialogue, is marked ONE VOICE on the shelf and is read by the narrator throughout. A book where only part of the dialogue could be placed is marked PARTLY CAST. That is deliberate, and it is shown before you listen rather than discovered after. The best cast books are at the top of the shelf.
Where a book says whether a character is a man or a woman, a voice to match reads them. Where it never says, Cast picks one for that character and keeps it the same on every iPhone.
Music
A few seconds of music play as a book begins and after its last line: a light acoustic theme for the young readers' books, a chamber piece for the classics, and a quiet piano theme for everything else. Music never plays under the voices. To turn it off, tap Voices and choose Music off.
Adding your own books
Tap Add a book under Your books and pick an EPUB file from Files. It must be an EPUB without copy protection: books bought from Kindle, Apple Books and most stores are protected and cannot be added. Cast reads the book on your phone, finds the characters and casts it. Nothing is uploaded. Tap Remove on a book to delete it and your place in it.
Adding books is free, and the first chapter of every book you add plays free. To hear your own books in full, subscribe to Cast: Your own books, described below.
No EPUB to hand? Try The Lighthouse Key, a short sample story with four speakers, written for Cast. Open the link on your iPhone, save it to Files, then tap Add a book and pick it.
Picking up where you left off
Cast remembers where you are in every book separately. When you come back to a book it starts one line before where you stopped, so a conversation never resumes on an answer without its question. Pause keeps your place. To hear a book from the top, open Chapters and choose Start from the beginning.
Moving around a book
Drag the progress bar to move through the book, or open Chapters to jump straight to one. The double arrows skip five lines back or forward, and the outer buttons go to the previous or next chapter. With VoiceOver, swipe up or down on the progress bar to move a chapter.
Speed steps through 0.8x to 1.5x and is remembered. Sleep pauses the book after 15, 30, 45 or 60 minutes, or at the end of the chapter.
Listening with the screen locked
Cast is built to keep playing with the screen locked and with the ring and silent switch set to silent, the way you would listen to any book. The book shows on the lock screen and in Control Center, and you can pause and play it from there or from your AirPods. If playback stops when your phone locks, please tell us which iPhone and iOS version you have, using the address at the bottom of this page.
Buying books and the subscription
The opening of every book on the shelf plays free. Each card shows how much: usually the first chapter or two.
Books on the shelf are bought one at a time, at the price on the book's card, which Cast reads from the App Store for your country. A book you buy is yours to keep, with nothing to renew. Buying it at the end of the free opening carries on from where the opening stopped.
Cast: Your own books is a subscription, monthly or yearly, that lets the books you add play in full. It may start with a free trial; the App Store sheet shows the trial and the price before you confirm. It renews automatically until you cancel it in your iPhone's Settings, under your Apple Account and Subscriptions, at least a day before the period ends. It covers the books you add, not the books on the shelf.
Restoring purchases
On a new phone or after a reinstall, scroll to the bottom of the shelf and tap Restore purchases. It brings back the books you bought and an active subscription. If it reports nothing to restore, check that you are signed in with the same Apple Account that bought them, because that is the cause almost every time.
Refunds
Apple is the merchant of record, so refunds are requested from Apple at reportaproblem.apple.com. We cannot issue one.
Your data
There is no account, no sign-in and no server. Cast keeps a few small things on your own phone: where you are in each book, your listening settings, the books you added, what you have bought, and when it last asked for a rating. The privacy page lists them in full, along with the three things Cast connects to. Nothing about what you listen to is uploaded. Deleting the app removes all of it, and your purchases come back with Restore purchases.
Contact
One person reads that, so a reply may take a few days.
Cast is published by Jeffrey L Carrier.