Reading out text is a little-known Siri feature that can be very helpful in certain situations. Siri can read out almost any text you can imagine. From books to emails, PDF documents, and web pages.
Crucially, you can use your device as usual, and Siri will continue to read out the content you selected simultaneously with you performing other tasks.
Siri isn’t configured to read text to you by default; to enable this, you need to turn on Spoken Content settings on your device, which are available in Accessibility.
In this article, we’ll show you the following:
- How to enable Spoken Content on an iPhone and iPad.
- How to enable Spoken Content on a Mac.
How to enable Spoken Content on an iPhone and iPad
On your iPhone or iPad:
- Open Settings.
- Scroll down and tap on Accessibility.
- Tap on Spoken Content.
You are provided with two options, Speak Selection and Speak Screen. Toggle them on using the switch.
Speak Selection
With this enabled, you can select a block of text and have Siri read it out to you by tapping Speak in the selection menu.
Speak Screen
With this option turned on, Siri will read everything visible on your screen.
To trigger Speak Screen, swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen. A controller window will appear as Siri begins reading the content.
The controller window is used to navigate through text on the screen. You can pause, skip backward and forward by paragraph, and change the reading speed.
For example, you may want Siri to skip reading out everything at the top of a webpage, such as menu bar items. To do so, tap the ‘skip forward’ button until Siri begins reading the text you want to listen to.
Tapping the ‘hand’ icon allows you to select a specific place in the text where Siri will begin reading.
More Spoken Content options on an iPhone and iPad
When Spoken Content is enabled, two more options appear in settings. Speech Controller and Highlight Content.
Speech Controller
When this feature is turned on, the Speak Screen controller window will be permanently visible. When not in use, it will shrink to a small arrow at the side of the screen.
Controller Actions allow you to modify the control windows’ behavior.
Highlight Content
When Highlight Content is enabled, Siri will highlight each word in a selected block of text as it is being spoken. You can adjust the style and color of the highlighted words and choose only to highlight words, sentences, or both.
By default, individual words are highlighted with a blue background as spoken, and the sentence they are contained in is underlined.
How to edit words pronounced incorrectly
If you find Siri mispronounces some words, you can edit their specific pronunciation by doing the following:
- Open Settings.
- Scroll down and tap on Accessibility.
- Tap on Spoken Content.
- Scroll down and tap on Pronunciations.
- Tap the ‘+’ icon on this screen to add a new pronunciation.
How to enable Spoken Content on a Mac
To turn on Spoken Content in macOS:
- Open System Settings.
- Select Accessibility.
- Scroll down and select Spoken Content.
- Toggle on Speak selection.
To trigger Siri speech, select a block of text in any application on your Mac and press Option+Esc, and Siri will immediately read it out to you.
A controller window will appear on the screen. As with the iPhone and iPad, this is used to pause, skip backward and forward by paragraph, and change the reading speed.
More Spoken Content options on a Mac
Click on the small ‘info’ icon to the right of the Speak Selection toggle.
In the settings window that appears, you can change the keyboard shortcut used to trigger the control window, adjust the style and color of the highlighted words and choose only to highlight words, sentences, or both. You can also change Siri’s voice, and the rate text is spoken.
