Listening — how to get it right

iPhone (iOS 26) and Android

English voices are built into every phone, so the Listen button should work straight away. This page is about making it sound good rather than robotic.

Choose the voice yourself

If your device has several English voices, pick the one this page should use. The choice is remembered.

iPhone — the short version

Settings → Accessibility → Read & Speak → Voices → English

Pick a voice and download it. Two things matter far more than which name you choose.

1. Download the Enhanced or Premium version. Every voice is offered in a compact and an enhanced version. The compact one is the flat robot most people think of as text-to-speech. The enhanced one is a few hundred megabytes and sounds like a person. For bedtime stories this is the single biggest improvement available.

2. Slow it down. In the same menu, drag Rate a little towards the tortoise. The default is news-reader pace, not bedtime pace.

Which voice

This page prefers, in order: Fiona (Scottish), then any Scottish voice, then British English, then Irish, Australian, New Zealand or South African, and only then American.

So if you download Fiona (Enhanced), she will be used automatically. Her language code is en-scotland, not en-GB — worth knowing if you go looking for her in a list.

Apple has retired some older voices in recent iOS releases. If Scottish or Fiona is not offered on your device, she is no longer available there; the closest alternative is an English (United Kingdom) voice in its Enhanced version.

iPhone — also worth switching on

Speak Screen, in the same Read & Speak menu. With it on, swiping down from the top of the screen with two fingers reads the whole page aloud. A reliable fallback if anything else fails.

Android

Open Settings and search for text-to-speech. The exact menu name differs between manufacturers: on Pixel it sits under Accessibility, on Samsung under General management, on Xiaomi under Additional settings.

1. Make sure the preferred engine is Speech Recognition & Synthesis by Google.
2. Tap the gear next to it → Install voice data → English → download. Choose a UK voice if offered.
3. Press Listen to an example to check.
4. Reopen this page in Chrome.

Diagnostics

If the Listen button does not work, press it and follow the link Show the voices this browser can see. It lists every voice available to the browser and tells you which one this page chose. That ends the guesswork.

Three common problems

The page was not reloaded. A browser reads the list of voices only when the page opens. A newly downloaded voice will not appear until you close the tab and open it again.

The download did not finish. Enhanced voices are large. Look for a tick, not a download arrow.

The phone is on silent. On iPhone the side switch mutes speech too.

An honest word

Even an enhanced voice does not pause where a story needs a pause, and it will not change its voice when someone shouts. It reads correctly and a little flatly.

Reading aloud yourself is still better. If that works for you, the stories can also simply be recorded — one at a time, on a phone — and this page will play them back in a real voice. For a child that is something else entirely.

Good night.

The Big Grey Stone

After The Little Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943), ch. I

One morning a young hare called Miku drew a picture in the sand.

He drew very carefully. The picture came out big and round and a little lumpy at one end.

First he showed it to his father.

“Nice stone,” said his father.

Then he showed it to the neighbour.

“Now that is a stone,” said the neighbour approvingly. “A big one.”

Then he showed it to his teacher, who adjusted her glasses and said:

“A very tidy stone, Miku. You draw good circles.”

Miku sat next to his picture all afternoon and felt miserable. Because it was not a stone at all.

Towards evening his little sister Tiiu came past. She was so small she could not really run yet. She looked at the drawing for a long time.

Then she asked:

“Does the fox have a tummy ache?”

Miku shot up like a spring.

“YES!” he shouted. “It’s a fox that ate a whole haystack! That’s why it looks like that! Look, there’s even a bit of straw sticking out!”

“I saw it,” said Tiiu.

They sat together on the sand until the sun went low and the fox’s shadow stretched all the way across the beach.

“Will you draw tomorrow too?” asked Tiiu.

“I’m going to draw a whole story here,” said Miku. “But you have to look. Because you see things.”

Miku slept well that night. And down on the sand, in the moonlight, slept a very full fox that no grown-up had noticed at all.

Good night.

The King Who Gave Sensible Orders

After The Little Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943), ch. X

Behind the village there was a hill, and on the hill a rock, and on the rock sat King Bertram.

He ruled everything he could see. That is what he said himself.

One evening a boy called Villem climbed the hill to find out whether the king was real.

“I am real,” said Bertram. “Ask me for something. I shall command it.”

“Order the wind to blow,” said Villem.

The king frowned, wet his finger, held it up and waited a little.

“Wind!” he then called. “Blow!”

And the wind blew.

“It was blowing anyway,” said Villem.

“Naturally,” said the king calmly. “I never command what cannot be done. If I ordered the wind to stand still, nothing would happen, and I would look like a fool. A king who commands the impossible is not a king. He is just a man shouting on a hill.”

Villem thought about that.

“Order the sun to set,” he said.

“Very well,” said the king. “Sit down.”

They sat. The sun sank slowly to the tops of the spruces. Then it touched the edge of the forest. Then half of it was gone.

And exactly then the king announced, very solemnly:

“Sun! Set!”

And the sun set.

Villem laughed so hard he had to lie down.

“That’s cheating!”

“That is timing,” said the king with dignity. “Half of wisdom is knowing when to give the order.”

When it began to get dark, the king said: “Now it is time for you to go home.”

“Is that an order?”

“It is an order that can be obeyed,” said the king. “And those are the hardest ones to give yourself. Commanding others is easy. Commanding yourself — that is real ruling.”

Villem went down the hill. And at home, when he took himself to his room and put himself to bed and pulled up his own blanket, he thought that tonight he too had ruled a small kingdom.

Good night.

Elmar the Lamplighter

After The Little Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943), ch. XIV

Far out at sea there was an island so small that it held one house, one lamp and one man.

The man was called Elmar, and his work was simple: when it got dark he lit the lamp, and when it got light he put it out.

The trouble was that the island was so small that it spun very fast.

So fast that the day lasted three minutes and the night lasted three minutes.

Light it. Put it out. Light it. Put it out.

Elmar was as tired as a man who has not slept for a hundred years, because he had not slept for a hundred years.

One evening — that is, during one three-minute night — a girl called Roosi rowed up to the island.

“Why don’t you take a break?” she asked.

“Because there is an agreement,” said Elmar, and lit the lamp. “Dark means light. I have never missed a single night.”

And Roosi understood something. Elmar was not stupid. He was the only person she knew who was busy with something other than himself.

“I want to help you,” she said. “But I can’t make the island slower.”

“No, you can’t,” said Elmar, and put the lamp out.

Roosi looked around. The island was small. Very small. So small that…

“Elmar,” she said. “What if you walk?”

“How do you mean?”

“If you walk slowly around the island, the same way it turns, you’ll stay inside the sunset. For as long as you like.”

Elmar stood still. It had never occurred to him that he could move.

He took one step. Then another.

And the sun, which should have vanished at once, stayed where it was — half in the water, orange and warm, as though someone were holding it.

They walked around the island together. Very slowly. The sun set for two hours.

“I have never seen it all the way through,” Elmar said quietly.

And then he let the sun go, lit the lamp — an agreement is an agreement — and for the first time in a hundred years fell asleep beside it with a perfectly calm face.

Roosi sat next to him and made sure the light kept burning.

Good night.

One Flower Among a Thousand

After The Little Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943), ch. XX

A boy called Juss had one flower.

He had not planted it. It had simply come up out of the ground under his window one spring, and Juss had decided that it was his.

He watered it every morning before school. He built a little ring of stones around it so nobody would step on it. When the frost came he went outside at night in his pyjamas and put an upturned pot over it, and took the pot off again in the morning.

The flower, for its part, complained a great deal. It said the wind was too strong. It said Juss watered it with water that was too cold. Once it even said the sun was too bright that day.

Juss sometimes grumbled to his friends that flowers were a lot of bother.

But he kept watering.

One summer Juss went to stay with his grandmother in the country. And there, a little off the forest track, was a meadow.

And the meadow was full of exactly the same flowers.

Hundreds. Perhaps thousands. Just like his. The same blue, the same height, leaning the same way to one side.

Juss sat down in the middle of the meadow and felt very bad indeed.

“I thought mine was special,” he said. “But he’s just an ordinary flower.”

He sat there a long time.

And then he looked properly at those thousand flowers, one by one.

And began to notice.

Not one of them had ever told anybody the water was too cold. For not one of them had anyone come outside at midnight in pyjamas. Not one had a ring of stones around it with one stone slightly larger than the rest, because it had been found at the sea.

He told them — a little rudely, but he was nine:

“You’re beautiful. But you’re empty. Nobody has looked after you.”

And then he went indoors, phoned his father, and asked him to water his flower, because it had not rained for four days.

That night, before he fell asleep, Juss understood something that is actually rather large.

His flower was not special because it was rare.

It was special because Juss had given it all those mornings.

Good night.

How to Make Friends with a Wildcat

After The Little Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943), ch. XXI

At the edge of the meadow, where the forest began, there lived a wildcat. He was grey, with tufted ears, and nobody had ever touched him.

A girl called Mari saw him for the first time one evening in June.

“Come and play,” said Mari.

“I can’t play with you,” said the wildcat. “I am not tamed.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means to make ties,” said the wildcat. “Right now you are one girl among a thousand girls to me. And I am one cat among a thousand cats to you. We don’t need each other. But if you tame me, we will.”

“How is it done?”

“Very patiently,” said the wildcat. “You sit down over there in the grass. Far away. You don’t say anything — words only cause confusion. You just sit. And each day you sit a little closer.”

So that is what they did.

On the first day Mari sat so far off that the wildcat was a grey speck.

On the fifth day she could make out the tufts on his ears.

On the tenth she could hear him breathing.

“And always come at the same time,” the wildcat said one evening. “If you come at seven, then from six o’clock I am happy. The closer it gets to seven, the happier I am. By seven I am quite beside myself. But if you come at any old hour, I will never know when to get my heart ready.”

So Mari came every evening at seven.

And then the end of summer came.

“I have to go back to the city,” said Mari, and her eyes were wet. “Now I’m sad. You were no use to me at all.”

“I was,” said the wildcat. “Look at the grass.”

Mari looked. The meadow was yellow, as it had been all summer.

“Before you, a yellow meadow meant nothing to me,” said the wildcat. “Now every yellow field in the world will remind me of you. And I shall come to love the sound of the wind in the grass.”

He came closer — close enough for Mari to feel how warm he was — and said quietly:

“What matters most cannot be seen with the eyes. Only with the heart.”

Mari went back to the city. But every year, in June, she returned. And always at seven.

Good night.