Siri is a handy virtual assistant. It’ll fetch information for you, send texts, and even tell you a joke if you ask it repeatedly (Siri is a little shy at first). But did you know that it can also narrate e-books?
If you can’t get enough of that lovely robot voice, here’s how to make your favorite literature come to synthetic life.
The tip, which comes courtesy of TechRadar, makes use of your iPhone or iPad’s Accessibility features to get things going. These are little helps that make iOS gear a bit more user-friendly for owners with less-than-perfect sight or hearing, but anyone can put them to use.
To get started, go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Speech, and then turn “Speak Screen” on. You can also adjust some settings here like the speaking rate, but you’ll also have a chance to tweak that on the fly.
Now that that’s set up, you can pick a book. I found that files in both iBooks and Amazon’s Kindle app worked, but PDF versions lost a little bit of functionality during narration. Specifically, the reading did not continue seamlessly from one page to the next. For works formatted specifically as e-books, however, Siri did just fine.
When you’ve made your selection, all you have to do is swipe two fingers down from the top of the screen, and Siri will start reading. A little window will pop up that lets you pause, skip forward and backward, and adjust the reading speed (those will be the “tortoise” and “hare” buttons). When Siri reaches the end of a page, it’ll just continue on to the next one with no further instructions from you. You can also have the narration running in the background and use other apps at the same time and even put your phone to sleep — it’ll work just like playing music or a podcast and keep reading, and you can still access that menu from your lock screen.
It’s not as good as having the sweet tones of someone like Morgan Freeman or Helen Mirren in your ear, but it is functional. And sometimes, Siri grossly mispronounces words, and then it gets hilarious.
