How Do I Make My Iphone Read To Me

Text-to-speech is a helpful iPhone feature that allows you to hear written text, for those moments where you're unable to read it. Apple offers a native text-to-speech feature on the iPhone that you can easily activate by following a few simple steps. Third-party apps exist, but they're rare, partly due to Apple's restrictive approach to what kind of access third-party developers can have. For most people, it's likely that the native feature will take care of your needs.

So, here's how to make your iPhone read text aloud using the built-in features alone.

What Is Text-to-Speech?

Text-to-speech means having your device read out on-screen text. It could be that you don't want to hold your iPhone and read, or it could be that you're cooking a meal and it's easier to have the instructions read out to you.

Whatever the reason, making your iPhone read out text to you is easy to do using free text-to-speech apps or Apple's built-in features, which we'll show you how to do below.

How to Use Siri to Read Out Text on an iPhone

Turning on this feature will give you hands-free access to ask Siri to read text out loud to you. Reading content from your apps will, however, require you to unlock your iPhone first.

Go to Settings > Siri & Search and turn on Siri if the feature isn't already on. You'll also have to toggle Allow Siri When Locked on.

These are the voice commands you can currently use to get Siri to read content to you.

Read me my emails: Siri will let you know what your three most recent emails are, even those that you've already read. She will tell you the sender and the subject line, but won't read the actual message.
Read me my latest email: Siri tell you the sender, subject, and content of the email and will give you the option to reply.
Read me my text messages: Siri will only read previously unread text messages and will give you the option to reply.

You can also tap on text from apps or browsers you're using to select it and then tap on Speak from the menu that appears. Siri will read the selected text out to you, with seemingly no limit on how much text you can select.

As an alternative to using Siri, you can try the Accessibility feature below.

Using Accessibility Features to Read Out Text on an iPhone

Turning on this second feature will enable your iPhone to read any text on the screen back to you, but it is not a completely hands-free experience.

Go to Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content. From here, you can enable Speak Selection to have the Speak button appear when selecting text. By toggling Speak Screen, you'll be able to have the whole screen read out when you swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen.

You can adjust the speed at which content is read and choose from a few different voices in English, including US, Australian, Irish, South African, and British accents.

If you want a completely hands-free experience, and one that works in the background after closing the app, load the screen you want to be read out loud and use the voice command "Hey Siri, speak screen." A menu will appear on the screen allowing you to speed up or slow down the speech rate, pause, and fast-forward. (You can also swipe down with two fingers at the top of the screen to have Siri read out that content.)

If you'd like to listen to the same piece of text multiple times, it's worth looking at tools to download text-to-speech as MP3 audio; these are often straightforward to use and help when you need to listen to the same piece of text again and again.

Reading iPhone Content Out Loud

By following these steps, you should have set up Apple's native features to convert text into speech, saving you time when you need it. If you feel that the iPhone's native text-to-speech feature is too limited, you can always try some free third-party apps that offer more features.

As helpful as text-to-speech is, speech-to-text can similarly help you save time. If you have to write a lot down on a day-to-day basis, you're likely to benefit from using this with dictation apps to save yourself all that typing.

The 6 Best Free Text-to-Speech Apps for iPhone

These free text-to-speech apps will make your iPhone read out onscreen text.