Let Your iPhone Read Text To You

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can have your iPhone read articles to you.

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So your iPhone has lots of different types of text-to-speech functionality. One of the things you could have it do is read the contents of the screen, like an article you're viewing either in Safari or the News App or somewhere else. So first let's set it up. Let's go into Settings and then in Settings look for Accessibility. From there go to Vision and look for Spoken Content. Turn On Speak Screen. Now you want to setup the Options here. The Speech Controller is something that will come up when we use this function. But you could turn it On right now and then it will always be there. You could also Highlight Content and have the words highlighted as they are spoken. So let's set that up for Words and have it use the default word color, though we could use another one.

Now let's go to Voices and here we can set the voice. We're just going to use the standard Siri voice but you could select other ones and it will download them and you could try them out right there and use the one that you want. You can also set the Speaking Rate. So you can have it go faster or slower. If you want you can have custom pronunciations. So you could actually go in and add pronunciation for a phrase. Have it say something a little different. 

Let's go and use this! I'm going to start here in the News App. I've got a news article right here. Let's have it spoken. Now in order to activate it you need to use two fingers and swipe down from the top of the screen down just a little bit. It will start reading the article right away. Let's give it a listen. You can see it's highlighting the word as it talks. You can jump forward to the next paragraph or go back. Pause it. You can tap here and change the speed. There are various different speeds. You can tap here and then tap somewhere and it will read starting from that point. If you're impatient to have this compressed back into a single doc you can tap here like that. Tap there to expand it again. Tap there to Dismiss it. You have to play around with it a few times to kind of get the hang to get to use it.

Now let's try to use it in Safari. What I find is best is that instead of trying to use it just with the whole contents of a webpage instead bring up the Reader View. So you can do that by tapping here and then go to Show Reader. Now it creates a really nice compact Reader View. It gets rid of a lot of things like ads and navigation bars and such. Then you can have the page spoken to you. You can see it will go through here and do it. This will actually work in most apps. So you can go to a screen like this in the App Store and then bring it up and it will start speaking the text that it can find there on the screen. It can even work in apps where you have typed the content. So here's a note in the Notes App. I can bring this up and it will read my note to me. Or here's an email in the Mail App. I'll bring it up here and it will start reading it to me. (Voice reading email note). 

Now note if you're looking for content on the web or an article in the News App or something like that and an item, like an image or symbol has some accessibility text attached to it, like a description or caption, it will actually read that. So occasionally it will highlight something like an image and then redo the description or caption of that image which is really handy especially if you're using this to listen while walking or biking or driving or something like that. You get the full description of what's there rather than skipping over things like images. Of course this only works if the content creator actually took the time to add this text to those images and things. 

Of course I should point out that you can also just select text. I'm going to select this text here and go to there. Then if I tap again on it you see I have these options here and one of those would be Speak. (Voice speaking.) I can go back here and Pause it. This was a different option here in Settings. Speak Selection. So make sure you have that turned On for that option. If you like you can also go to Typing Feedback here and have it speak words. So as you type words it will speak them back to you. A handy way to communicate with somebody but also a handy way to review what it is that you're writing as you are writing it.

I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.