If you find it more convenient to listen to some text on your iPhone or iPad rather than read it, you can easily enable that capability. You might, for example, want your device to read a web page, ebook, or another document to you while you perform household chores. Here’s how to use text-to-speech on iPhone or iPad.

Why You’ll Love This Tip:

Listen to web articles or books when you’re busy with other tasks.
Have your iPhone or iPad read to you if you can’t see the screen well.

How to Use Text-to-Speech on iPhone

System Requirements

This tip works on iPhones running iOS 16 or newer. Learn how to update to the latest operating system.

Apple made sure that the iPhone comes with a broad array of built-in accessibility features so that anyone can use it. Text-to-speech is just one of these accessibility options. You can use this tool to have your iPhone read aloud to you. For more iPhone accessibility tips and tricks, be sure to sign up for our free Tip of the Day newsletter. Now, here’s how to set up text-to-speech on iPhone:

Open the Settings app, and tap Accessibility.
Tap Spoken Content.
Tap the toggle next to Speak Selection to enable or disable it.
Highlight Content will highlight each word as it is spoken.
You can tap Voices to choose a different computer-generated voice.
You can also select your Default Language.
If you change your Default Language, you can turn the toggle next to Detect Languages off. This will let your iPhone read in other languages instead of translating to your default language.
The Speaking Rate slider allows you to adjust how fast or slow the text-to-speech voice reads.
Lastly, you can add pronunciations, if the text-to-speech voice is not pronouncing something correctly.
To use text-to-speech, tap and hold some text to highlight it.
Tap the Speak button, and your iPhone will begin reading the text aloud.
You can tap the highlighted text and tap Pause to stop the reading at any time.

Now, you can use text-to-speech to have your iPhone or iPad read aloud to you if you have trouble reading everything on your screen, or while you’re doing chores, cooking, or going for a walk.