Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. On today's episode let's take a look at Text-to-Speech
in iOS 8.
To enable the Text-to-Speech function you want to go into Settings and then under General
go to Accessibility and then Speech. You have three options here.
Now the first one we have already had available in previous versions of iOS and that will
allow you to speak a bit of text as selected.
The new thing is Speak Screen. We're going to turn that on. When any of these are on
you can choose things like the Voices. You've got various languages but also inside of English
you've got various different forms of English plus quality. So I've set it to one there.
I don't see much different between the quality ones but presumably there is.
Then you get to set a speaking rate and to be able to adjust that on the fly. Then you
can turn on or off Highlight Content. It is actually useful to have the Highlight Content
on if you want to follow along with the speaking. So now that we have it on let's try it out.
So here I am in the Notes app and I'm going to tap to select here. Select All. You can
see now that in addition to Copy and Paste and other things I have a Speak button.
All right so now let's test the Speak Screen function. So what I'm going to do is I'm going
to put two fingers above the screen so about above where the camera is on the iPad and
I'm going to drag down onto the screen to about halfway down. So I'm not starting with
my fingers on the screen but above it and dragging down.
So you can see not only did the text get read but you also saw those buttons appear that
allows me to Pause the reading or speed it up or slow it down.
So if you try this with a web page we are typically going to get more than we bargained
for. For instance, this web page is going to read everything. At the very top.........
So you see it is reading everything in the Navigation Bar at the top. That is not what
we want. We want to read the article.
So Speak Screen works really well with the reader mode in Safari. So we can get into
the reader mode by tapping on those lines just to the left of the URL and just to the
right of the Bookmarks bar. So only appears on news articles, blog posts, anything that
has a lot of text in it. You tap on that and now we are in Reader mode. Now if you use
the Speak Screen function. So you can see now it is going to read just the stuff that
we really want.
Using the Reader mode with Speak Screen works really well.
Now here is a feature that a lot of people have been waiting for. You can use Speak Screen
with iBooks. It actually works really well with iBooks because not only will it read
the text but it will even flip pages for you. So here we are in a book. Let's start the
Speak Screen function........... So you can see there it flipped the page for you. So
basically you can turn just about any book, especially novels, into audiobooks.
So let's take a moment here to look at special functions. You can see that it shrinks over
to just a dot on the left if you leave for a while but you have the ability to move forward
and back and you can play and stop and you can slow down and speed up. You can just dismiss
it with that X and you can shrink it over manually with the left arrow over there. So
there is a lot of functionality that you can do.
Now this is certainly not good enough to replace audiobooks. Frequently words are mispronounced
or the wrong version of a word is used. For instance, the pronunciation live or l i v
e instead of live seems to always be used and that is kind of confusing when reading
some text but it is a good alternative when there is no audiobook available or when it
is something short to read like an article or webpage.
Hope you found this useful. Until next time this is Gary with MacMost.com.