On your iPhone, you can now ask Siri to read articles out loud. While speech-to-text has been available for a while, asking Siri to read any open articles is a new iOS 17 feature.
How to ask Siri to read articles out loud
On your iOS 17 device, you first need to open any article in Safari. Next, launch Siri and say, “Read this.” You can either use the “Siri” voice command to launch the voice assistant, or press and hold the power button to do so.
You can also have Siri read out articles by selecting the aA (Page Settings) button to the left of the address bar and selecting Listen to Page. You’ll hear an alert tone and then Siri will start reading the article for you. You can select the aA button again to skip forward, back, increase the speed of the voice, or to end the listening session.
A simple gesture to make Siri read articles
There’s an alternative way to have Siri read articles out loud for you. To use it, go to Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content and enable Speak Screen. Once you do this, open any article in Safari and use two fingers to swipe downwards from the top of the screen. You’ll hear Siri read out the article for you now. This is actually a global setting, which means that it’ll read the content on screen in any app on your iPhone.
Siri’s article reading is dependent on Safari’s reader mode. Some websites block reader mode entirely, which means that Siri will not be able to read those pages out loud for you. In other cases, reader mode is unable to render the entire article. Instead, it picks up random chunks and misses large blocks of text. In these cases, Siri will only read out those parts that show up in reader mode.
