Setting up the app

Speak works the moment the app is installed. But the voice the iPad ships with is the small, robotic one, and a Bible read in that voice is hard to listen to for long. Ten minutes of setup gives it a voice you'd happily hear for an hour.

1. Download a better voice

This is the one step that matters. Here it is done on an iPad, choosing a Siri voice:

Step by step, on the iPad:

1. Open Settings › Accessibility › Read & Speak › Voices › English.

2. Pick a voice and tap the download arrow beside it. Choose one marked Premium if it's offered, or Enhanced — those are the natural-sounding ones. Downloads are a few hundred megabytes, so do it on Wi-Fi.

3. Wait for the download to finish (the arrow becomes a tick). Voices are per device: a voice on an old iPad isn't on a new one.

Then in the app: Settings (the ⚙ button) › Read Aloud › pick the voice you downloaded. Hear this voice plays a line so you can compare. Slower and Faster set the pace.

Which voice?

Taste, mostly — but a few are consistently good for long reading in American English. Try these first:

Avoid anything marked Compact, and the novelty voices (Bells, Cellos, Bad News). If the list in the app says only basic voices are installed, step 1 hasn't finished yet.

If you want a Siri voice

Siri's voices don't appear in any app's own list; the only way to hear one is through the iPad's own Read & Speak settings. So:

1. In Settings › Accessibility › Read & Speak › Voices, choose a Siri voice (the Siri group at the top of the list) and download it.

2. In the app's Read Aloud settings, leave the voice on the first choice — "use the device's Accessibility settings".

In that mode the speaking rate also comes from Read & Speak › Speaking Rate rather than the app's Slower / Faster, and Bible names are said the way Siri says them.

Names

Whichever voice you choose, the app tells it how to say the rare names — Habakkuk, Zerubbabel, Melchizedek — from an English pronouncing dictionary, so they come out the way they're read in church rather than as a guess. If a name sounds wrong to you, that's worth telling us: it becomes one line in a list.

Voices for the Spanish and Chinese Bibles

If you've downloaded the extra Bibles (Settings › Bibles in the app), Speak on a Spanish or Chinese card reads it in a voice for that language, not your English one. The iPad comes with only a basic voice for each, and it sounds robotic. To give them a natural voice:

1. Open Settings › Accessibility › Read & Speak › Voices and choose Spanish (or Chinese).

2. Download a voice marked Premium or Enhanced from the main list, not the Siri group, which apps can't use. For Spanish there are voices for Mexico, the United States and Spain; Mexican or US Spanish is what most American readers will expect. For Chinese, choose a Mandarin voice for China mainland: both Chinese Bibles are in simplified characters. Cantonese voices aren't used.

3. That's all. The app picks the best voice installed for each language, and uses a new one as soon as it has downloaded.

Like the English voices, each is a few hundred megabytes; download on Wi-Fi. Only download the languages you'll listen to.

Two settings you don't need — but might like

• Speak Selection (Settings › Accessibility › Read & Speak) adds a Speak button whenever you select text, anywhere on the iPad, not only in this app.
• Speak Screen reads any screen aloud when you swipe down from the top with two fingers.

Neither affects the app's own Speak button; they're for the rest of the iPad.

2. Turn on Apple Intelligence, for Ask

Ask finds verses, names, words and references on any iPad. On one that supports Apple Intelligence it also writes a short answer to the question, every sentence citing the entry it came from. The writing happens on the iPad itself; nothing is sent away to do it.

1. Open Settings › Siri. (Before iPadOS 27 the page is called Apple Intelligence & Siri, with an Apple Intelligence switch: turn it on.)

2. Check that Siri's Language is the same as the iPad's (Settings › General › Language & Region). Apple Intelligence only runs when they match.

3. The first time, the iPad downloads what it needs, which can take a while — leave it on Wi-Fi and charging.

4. If Screen Time is on, look under Content & Privacy Restrictions › Siri and make sure Apple Intelligence isn't restricted there.

The app checks when it opens. If something still needs doing it says so, and once Apple Intelligence is ready it says nothing at all. If this iPad doesn't support Apple Intelligence, the app tells you once, and nothing else changes: Ask still finds everything, and for a question about a passage it shows a short summary of the chapter prepared ahead of time, labelled as such.

Tap ⚙ at the top of the page. Settings is a short list of pages, like the iPad's own, with a search at the top: type what you're after — voice, font, history — and it takes you to the setting. Nothing here is permanent; every switch can be turned back.

Start with a reading profile

The first row, Reading Profile, sets several switches in one tap:

• Simple Reader — the page and Speak, with the largest buttons. No Search, no Ask, no Margin: nothing to get lost in.
• Reference Bible — adds Search and the Margin.
• Ask – Tell Me More — adds Ask as well.

Choosing a profile is only a starting point. Every switch it sets is still a switch of its own, so you can start from one and change what you like.

The Margin, your way

The Margin shows what's known about the verse you tap, in sections. In Settings › Margin you choose which sections appear and in what order: check the ones you want, and drag them into place. Someone who only wants the verse in today's words and the cross-references can have just those two, at the top.

A section with nothing to say about the verse is skipped on its own, so you'll rarely see all seven at once. Inside the Margin, tapping a section's heading folds it away for now; leaving it out in Settings hides it altogether.

What else can be turned on or off

The Ask and Margin switches are in two places — on their own pages and under Toolbar — and either one changes both.