How to make your iPhone read text aloud to you

Voice Content (formerly Speech) is an Apple accessibility feature in iOS and iPadOS. It allows your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad to read text aloud. It is very useful if you have difficulty reading small text or just when you are multitasking.

In this detailed guide and tutorial, you’ll learn how to enable Voice Content on your iPhone and customize the feature to work the way you want it to.

Table of Contents

Access your voice content settings on iPhone

In order for your iPhone or iPad to read text aloud, you must first access your Voice Content settings. To reach them:

1. Open Setting app on your iPhone or iPad.

2. Scroll down and press Accessibility.

3. Under Vision section, press Content says to view all available settings related to the feature.

The following sections show you how to use each of the accessibility settings in the Voice Content screen.

Ask your iPhone to read the selected text aloud

Allow Say choice to set up your iPhone to read selected text aloud. You can then highlight text in documents and web pages and tap Speak on the text-to-speech pop-up menu.

Tips: Press and hold a word to highlight it. Then, use the handles around to mark additional words, sentences, and paragraphs.

By default, your iPhone will underline sentences and highlight words as it reads them using Speak Selection. You can customize that by diving into Highlight content install (more on that later).

Let your iPhone speak the on-screen text

You can also ask your iPhone to read the entire screen aloud by activating the side switch Speak the screen. You can then swipe down from the top of the screen with two fingers and the device will start reading whatever is on the screen, starting from the top. Note that this does not work on the Lock Screen, Home screen, and Control Center.

Button speak screen and playback controls

Use the playback controls on the Voice Controller to increase or decrease the reading speed, skip lines and sentences, and pause reading. You can also tap Speak on touch and tap any phrase or sentence to have your iPhone start reading it. If you do nothing, the Voice Controller will disappear.

With the Speak Screen option enabled, you can also ask Siri to start speaking by saying, “Hey Siri, Speak Screen.” Learn how to set up and configure Siri on iPhone.

Always leave the Voice Controller on the screen

You can also get a Voice Controller overlay to stay on screen at all times. To do that, tap Voice controller option and activate the side switch Show controller.

Voice controller > Show controller” class=”wp-image-17376″ /></figure>
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<p>You can then expand Speech Controller and tap <strong>Play</strong> icon so your iPhone starts saying whatever is on the screen. Again, use <strong>Before</strong> and <strong>Next</strong> icons to move between lines and <strong>Speed, velocity</strong> icon to increase or decrease speed. Don’t forget to activate <strong>Speak on touch </strong>let the device read whatever you touch.</p>
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By default, long-pressing the collapsed Voice Controller icon prompts your iPhone to start speaking text aloud, while double-tapping the icon turns it into Speak on touch method. You can change that using Long press and Double tap at the bottom of the Voice Controller screen.

Alternatively, you can change the opacity of the Voice Controller by tapping Opacity not working. Reducing the value will make it less intrusive.

Highlight your iPhone text when it speaks out loud

Touch Highlight content in Voice Content settings to customize how highlighting works when your iPhone reads text aloud.

You can set iPhone to highlight only individual words or sentences, change the highlighting style (underline or background color), and adjust the highlight color for words and sentences. Try different combinations to determine which works best for you.

Ask your iPhone to give you typing feedback

Speech also allows your iPhone to speak text aloud as you type. Clap Typing feedback to specify how you want to receive the response. You can help your iPhone speak individual characters (with response delay), whole words, autocorrect, and even predictive text.

If your iPhone doesn’t have input prediction enabled, go to Setting > Shared > Keyboard and turn on the switch next to it Guess.

Choose voice and dialect for voice content

Do you want your iPhone to read text aloud in a different voice? Clap Voiceand you can switch between voices for each language your iPhone speaks aloud — for example: English, French, Hindiet cetera.

Alternatively, you can switch to an enhanced version of the same voiceover. For example, go to English > American English) > Samantha and press Samantha (Advanced). Voice packs (usually around 150 MB) must be downloaded before you can use them.