Your iPhone Can Read To You #cooltip

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Your siri-capable iPhone or iPad or iPod Touch can read to you, if you enable it.[/caption]

I am probably the last person to find this out, but using an accessibility feature in iOS, you can set your iPhone or iPad or iPod touch to read any selected text to you.

This is something I’ve been looking for, especially while I am trying to consume text content at the gym or in any other situation where reading it is difficult.

Lifehacker gives us the skinny:

To enable this feature, follow these steps or (watch the video above for a demonstration):

1. Open the Settings app on your home screen.
2. Tap the General tab.
3. Scroll down and tap the Accessibility tab.
4. Tap the Speak Selection option (it should be set to off, currently).
5. Tap the toggle switch to turn it on. You can also adjust the rate of speech as well. It’s worth noting, however, that the default is already pretty fast. If anything, you might want to slow it down.

Once you’ve got Speak Selection enabled, just highlight any text like you would if you were going to copy it but tap the “Speak” button instead. This option will change to “Pause” while the text is being spoken so you can stop it at any point. Pretty cool!

Enable this on your iOS device to get cool text-to-speech functionality:

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Go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Speak Selection to enable. (Click to enlarge)[/caption]

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Select text, then choose “Speak” to hear it. (Click to Enlarge)[/caption]