What people usually ask

An app for Mac, iPhone and iPad that reads textbooks and articles aloud and helps you understand them. It shows where you are in the text, fixes the reading order in messy PDFs and explains hard terms and figures. Before a section you are told what it is about, and afterwards you get questions to answer in your own words.

Students with a lot to read, in Swedish or English. Erling is built with dyslexia and ADHD in mind: short sections with a clear end, a Continue button instead of the whole document at once, no streaks to keep alive and no red numbers for what is left.

No. The right reading order, the term explanations and the questions afterwards are just as useful if you would rather read it yourself. The text can be read as a calm page instead of a skewed scan.

Not in advance. Erling's one rule is to help you understand, never to skip the thinking. Before a section you are told what it is about, how it is structured and what to keep in mind, but not the conclusions. The summary is shown only once you have read. The questions afterwards you answer yourself, and the reply points back into the text rather than grading you.

Swedish and English, for both the texts and the voice. Erling detects which language a text is in. The explanations come in Swedish or English, whichever you choose in the settings. The app itself is in English during the beta; a Swedish interface is coming.

PDF first of all. Word documents, RTF, text files, Markdown and web pages are turned into pages when you add them and work as a PDF from then on. The Safari extension on Mac, iPhone and iPad sends the page you are reading to Erling with a tap.

After my grade school teacher, who followed my class from first through ninth grade. Erling always encouraged us to explore and make things up.

That most of it works, that some of it doesn't yet, and that something comes out wrong in some texts: a sentence read in the wrong order, a word explained oddly, a figure described strangely. The app is handed out through TestFlight, Apple's service for beta testing, and new versions arrive automatically that way. Join the beta.

Nothing during the beta. The explanations and the questions go through a service that costs me money, so they need an invite. There is no subscription in the beta. If Erling ever becomes a real app, the explanations will cost something, and reading aloud will stay free.

Reading aloud happens entirely on your device and works right away. The reading order, the term explanations, the figures and the questions go through a server I pay for, and the invite is how I know who is using it. You ask for it in the app, with your name, and if I recognize the name I activate it, usually the same day.

On the Mac: the Erling menu → Request an Invite…. On iPhone and iPad: the gear at the top left of the library → under Analysis service, Request an Invite…. Write your name and send. Then it's just a matter of waiting: the app keeps reading as usual meanwhile, and the explanations appear automatically once the invite is activated. The invite follows you to your other devices through iCloud.

Yes, a number of pages a day per invite, set so that ordinary course reading fits with room to spare. A text someone else has already read with Erling costs nothing and doesn't count. When the day's pages run out the app says so, and reading aloud still works.

Right-click, or hold your finger on what went wrong, and choose Report a Problem. Write what you saw, or just turn on Too hard to understand if an explanation was too hard. The report includes what the app showed, so that I can see what happened. For something that isn't about one text, there is the Help menu on the Mac and Settings on iPhone and iPad.

On your devices and in your own iCloud. Where you are in each text, your highlights and your answers sync between your Mac, iPhone and iPad through iCloud. I can't see them.

To fix the reading order and explain the terms, each page is sent once, as an image and as text, to a server I run, which forwards it to Anthropic (the company behind Claude). The server keeps no copy of the page and doesn't log the content. What is kept is the result: the reading order, the term explanations and what each section is about, so that the same text doesn't have to be analyzed again. Your answer to a question is sent when you answer, so that you get a reply, and isn't kept there. Your highlights are never sent.

No. What is kept about a page sits under a fingerprint of the page's text and is handed out only to an app that presents the same page. Without the text, you get nothing.

No. Erling uses Anthropic's API, and under its terms what is sent isn't used to train models. I can't promise more than the terms say.

Yes. Choose Disable Analysis in the text's menu, and it is never sent anywhere. Reading aloud still works, in the reading order the app can work out on its own.

Yes, much better. Erling uses the system's voices, and the ones that come preinstalled are the simplest. Go to Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → Voices and download an Enhanced or Premium voice for Swedish and English. Erling then picks the best voice available for the text's language.

macOS 26, iOS 26 or iPadOS 26, or newer. Older versions unfortunately don't work. More about the requirements.

Reading aloud, yes: the voice is on the device. The explanations for a text you have already read stay too. Choose Prepare for Offline in the text's menu before you leave, and everything for the text is fetched in advance.

Yes, on iPhone and iPad. Control it from the lock screen or your headphones: next and previous skip a sentence. It pauses when a call comes in or the headphones are unplugged.

Claude, from Anthropic. The model is pinned on the server, and the app never sends instructions of its own to it: the same text gets the same analysis for everyone. I chose the model by comparing several on real textbooks, with the reading order as the measure.