If you’re not so keen on reading bedtime stories to your children, you can always have Siri do it for you. After all, she is your personal assistant, right? In all seriousness, you can have Siri read your iBooks and other pieces of text aloud, giving you an audiobook-like experience from your existing iBooks.
Giving Siri the ability to read selected text aloud is actually very easy, but it is buried layers deep in the Settings app. You can enable it by heading into the Accessibly menu within the General section of the Settings app. Towards the top of the screen, you will see an option under the name of Speak Selection. Tap into this menu and enable the feature using the on/off switch.
Once enabled, you can customize how Siri reads your content in a couple different ways. For instance, you can switch Siri’s language dialect and speaking rate to your liking. You can also choose whether or not you’d like each word highlighted in real time as it is read.
Now that you’ve enabled Speaking, pop open iBooks or any other app that has text that you’d like to be read. Highlight the text you’d like read and hit the Speak button from the copy and paste window. Siri will then start reading to you. If you’d like to pause your reading, just highlight another piece of text and hit the Pause button from the copy and paste window.
There you have it: free-ish audio books for your jog, commute, and babysitting.
Via TUAW
