Hear the three engines on fourteen kinds of text.

The same sentence, three engines.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Pride and Prejudice · Jane Austen · 1813

Standard is the free engine, with forty-one voices in six languages. Personal is the one that clones a voice from fifteen seconds of audio; the clips here use its preset voices. Premium is the most expressive of the three and the only one that can give each character in a dialogue its own voice.

The opening of a novel

Long sentences, an aside set off in dashes, a semicolon or two. Most of a library is paragraphs like this one.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.

Moby Dick · Herman Melville · 1851 · in the Chorus Library

• HeartStandardAmerican0:16
• GeorgeStandardBritish0:16
• AlbaPersonalEnglish0:15
• CharlesPersonalEnglish0:17
• ChristiePremiumClear and warm narrator0:21
• PeterPremiumDeep and authoritative0:19

Dialogue

Two speakers taking turns. In Premium’s Fully Voiced mode each character gets a voice of their own. Standard and Personal read it as one narrator.

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where—” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. “—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation. “Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland · Lewis Carroll · 1865 · in the Chorus Library

• Rachel as narratorPremiumGentle and soothing · Fully Voiced: a voice per character0:23
• EmmaStandardBritish0:18
• JanePersonalEnglish0:20

A children’s story

Short sentences, a list of four names, and a mother’s warning in quotation marks. Potter wrote it to be read to someone.

Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were—Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter. They lived with their Mother in a sand-bank, underneath the root of a very big fir-tree. “Now, my dears,” said old Mrs. Rabbit one morning, “you may go into the fields or down the lane, but don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden: your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.”

The Tale of Peter Rabbit · Beatrix Potter · 1902

• Karen as narratorPremiumWarm and conversational · Fully Voiced: a voice per character0:25
• NovaStandardAmerican0:21
• MaryPersonalEnglish0:24

A poem

Short lines and no full stop until the end of the stanza. Listen for whether the rhythm survives or the lines run together.

Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all, And sweetest in the gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird That kept so many warm. I’ve heard it in the chillest land, And on the strangest sea; Yet, never, in extremity, It asked a crumb of me.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers · Emily Dickinson · 1891

• LilyStandardBritish0:18
• StellaPremiumDramatic and resonant0:25
• EvePersonalEnglish0:19

A speech from a play

Blank verse. The sense runs past the line endings, there is an exclamation in the middle, and a full stop lands mid-line.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

Macbeth, Act V · William Shakespeare · 1623 · in the Chorus Library

• StevePremiumStrong and direct0:29
• DanielStandardBritish0:21
• JavertPersonalEnglish0:42

Nineteenth-century science

One sentence of sixty-odd words with three subordinate clauses. The narrator has to keep track of where it is going.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

The Origin of Species · Charles Darwin · 1859 · in the Chorus Library

• MichaelStandardAmerican0:20
• GeorgePersonalEnglish0:15
• MarkPremiumSmooth and professional0:22

A research abstract

Dense technical writing, the kind the Papers shelf pulls from arXiv every day. Hardly any of it ever gets recorded by a person.

Under standard graphical assumptions, the Markov boundary of a target variable is the smallest set of features that renders every other feature redundant. Once the boundary is observed, the target is conditionally independent of the rest of the table. This is a tempting object for tabular prediction, since it names exactly the columns a model should need. Yet modern regressors are still trained on the full feature set.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Markov Boundary for Tabular Prediction · Shu Wan, Abhinav Gorantla, Huan Liu and K. Selçuk Candan · 2026 · CC BY 4.0

• SarahStandardAmerican0:23
• HughPremiumThoughtful and measured0:25
• PaulPersonalEnglish0:23

Travel writing with numbers in it

Numbers written out in words and a distance in miles. Numbers are the usual place for a narrator to trip.

The Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world—four thousand three hundred miles.

Life on the Mississippi · Mark Twain · 1883 · in the Chorus Library

• AdamStandardAmerican0:12
• Stuart BellPersonalEnglish0:15
• AlanPremiumClassic narrator0:16

An article or newsletter

Present-day prose with a version number, a product name and a count in it. The kind of text that arrives from Safari or a feed.

Chorus Reader 3.0 is the biggest update we have ever shipped. The new Chorus Library brings more than a hundred hand-picked classics, free for every reader. Play Sample narrates a passage of the actual book on your device, in your chosen voice, so you can hear it before you shelve it.

Chorus Reader 3.0 release notes · Chorus Reader · 2026

• BellaStandardAmerican0:17
• VeraPersonalEnglish0:15
• KaraPremiumConfident and articulate0:19

Philosophy

A list of adjectives, an old-fashioned “thyself”, and a sentence that hinges on “by reason of”.

Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil.

Meditations · Marcus Aurelius, translated by George Long · 1862 · in the Chorus Library

• LewisStandardBritish0:13
• MariusPersonalEnglish0:10
• LethePremiumDistinguished and formal0:14

A horror story

Poe’s narrator keeps interrupting himself with dashes and exclamation marks, then asks you a question. Hard to read flat.

True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

The Tell-Tale Heart · Edgar Allan Poe · 1843

• JoplinPremiumExpressive storyteller0:29
• FenrirStandardAmerican0:20
• MichaelPersonalEnglish0:27

An essay

One sentence, sixty words, five commas.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Walden · Henry David Thoreau · 1854 · in the Chorus Library

• Bill BoerstPersonalEnglish0:12
• LiamStandardAmerican0:09
• SeanPremiumRich baritone0:14

A detective story

The passage the app plays when you tap Play Sample on this book in the Chorus Library.

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes · Arthur Conan Doyle · 1892 · in the Chorus Library

• FableStandardBritish0:08
• AndrewPremiumClear and steady0:10
• FantinePersonalEnglish0:09

A journal entry

Dates, clock times and a hyphenated place name. Listen for how each engine handles 8:35 P.M.

3 May. Bistritz.—Left Munich at 8:35 P. M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets.

Dracula · Bram Stoker · 1897 · in the Chorus Library

• AlloyStandardAmerican0:15
• BradPremiumEnergetic and crisp0:20
• AzelmaPersonalEnglish0:20

Six more languages

Standard comes with Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Hindi. Personal adds German, and downloads its Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese packs when you ask for them.