In Share Anything With Siri, I wrote about how to use Siri to share webpages and screenshots. Siri is also useful for reading those webpages to you, or really any text on the screen, selected or not, depending on your preference.

Exploring these features last week, I discovered that you can toggle on or off the ability to speak selected text. Additionally, I found that Apple devices may use a different voice than the chosen Siri voice.

With some more investigation, I learned how to specify the “System Voice” used for spoken content separately from that of Siri.

Voice Choice

Initially, I found that speaking selected text used a poorer quality voice while speaking a whole page on iPhone and iPad used the chosen Siri voice. That’s because the former is triggered by an at-will while the latter invokes Siri and its intelligence.

My further sleuthing revealed that there are separate voice selection settings for Siri and for Spoken Content, but it’s possible to select the same voice for each.

On all platforms, Siri voice selection is in Siri’s panel in Settings. For spoken content, look for voice selection in Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content. You can choose one of the available Siri voices if you wish.

Speak Selection

On all devices, toggle Speak Selection in Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content. On Mac, some applications have an Edit > Speech submenu where you can start or stop speaking a selection, while others lack these commands. Nonetheless, the keyboard shortcut to speak selected text works everywhere. The default shortcut is Option+Escape.

On iPhone and iPad, when you select text, one of the available menu options is Speak. Tap the selection again and the command becomes Pause. On Mac, Option+Escape (or your chosen shortcut) works to start speaking a selection and also to stop it.

Listen to Page

In Safari, Reader simplifies a webpage view by focusing on the text and images of an article and stripping out ads, related content, and more. On Mac, click the Reader button on the left side of the address bar or choose View > Show Reader. On iPhone/iPad, tap the aA button on the left side of the address bar and choose Show Reader or long-press the aA button.

The Listen to Page command is only available on iPhone and iPad and requires that the webpage is compatible with Reader. On Mac, since you can initiate spoken content anywhere, you can do so regardless of this compatibility.

To speak a supported page on iPhone/iPad, tap the aA button and choose Listen to Page. You can listen to the page in both normal view and Reader. Notably, speaking a page invokes Siri and uses the voice specified for this feature.

Spoken Content Controller

The controller for spoken content is available when speaking a page on iPhone/iPad (during speech, tap aA for these controls) and when speaking anything on Mac.

You can specify a speaking rate: the slow end is 0.5x on Mac and 0.75x on iPhone and iPad; the fast end is 2.0x on all devices. You can also play/pause, skip forward or back one sentence at a time, or end listening.

As of iOS 17.3, the only difference between Pause and End Listening is that latter switches to Resume Listening, wherein the device resumes at the beginning of the current sentence. When you Play, the device resumes at the precise spot it paused.

Also, if you End Listening, the device oddly does not reset the experience. Instead, the menu offers Resume Listening, as described above, so there’s no direct way to restart from the beginning of the page.

This happens even if you reload the page or close and reopen it. The only way I’ve yet found to reset is to force quit Safari from the App Switcher and reopen it.

There are a number of other settings available for Spoken Content on Mac and mobile, such as highlighting words and/or sentences during speech. Which ones do you find most useful? What might you experiment with next?