Feb 13 2011
How to Turn Text to Speech on the iPhone
There may be times when you want to type and have the text read out to you, perhaps if you are poorly and still need to communicate, or perhaps you would like an email or web page read to you, there’s an app called ‘Speak It’ that can help.
The iPhone does come with limited Text to Voice functionality as part of it’s operating system, but when you turn it on it alters the way that you interact with the phones interface and isn’t easy to use, Speak It provides a simple and cost effective alternative.
When you load Speak It, you are shown a text box where you can either type to paste copied text into, and clicking on the Speak It! button will read the text back to you. The software comes with 4 voices as standard, 2 male & 2 female, it is possible to buy more voices, but there really isn’t a need too as the quality of speech is very good. An additional nice feature is the option to be able to email the voice output produced to a contact to hear.
At the moment ‘Speak it’ isn’t integrated into iOS which is a shame as it would be great to be able to translate text to speech directly in apps, but at least this provides a solution, and doesn’t cost a great deal, perhaps in the future text to speech will be completely integrated into the iPhones software.