Listen to Articles with this iPhone Shortcut

Want an easy way to have your iPhone read aloud articles and webpages? You can create a custom shortcut to enable text-to-speech for any website content.

Let me quickly show you how you can create an iPhone shortcut that will let you read any content from any webpage. It is helpful in reading articles at a certain speed. For example, 1.5x or 1.25x. This will help you read articles faster.

And the other use case is you can listen to the articles while you are commuting or you are doing other stuff. You can use earphones and listen to the articles or maybe you are tired. You just don’t want to look at screen at night.

Then also this shortcut can be helpful.

Watch the video tutorial

The Speak Screen Feature

There is a feature called Speak screen (you can find it in accessibility settings from settings of your iPhone) which can be activated by swiping two fingers on from the above of your screen whenever you are on a webpage.

For example I have got this article opened you can enable speak screen feature by swiping two fingers from the top of your screen.

So this will easily let you listen to the article and here you can also select the speech rate like 1x, 1.5x, 2x things like that but here is an even better solution you can achieve the same thing using an iPhone shortcut.

How the Shortcut Works

So I’ve already created an iPhone shortcut and it works something like this. Suppose you’re on this page, you can tap on the share icon, scroll down to find speak text because this is the name of my iPhone shortcut. You can rename it anything.

The shortcut grabs the text from a webpage and feeds it to your iPhone’s built-in text-to-speech feature. You can control the voice, speed, pitch, and more.

To use it, simply open a webpage, tap the share button, and run the shortcut. It starts reading immediately.

Creating the Shortcut

Here’s how to make the “Listen to Articles” shortcut:

1. Open the Shortcuts app and tap the plus button.
2. Search for and add the “Get Contents of Webpage” action.
3. Add the “Get Text from Input” action from suggestions.
4. Add the “Speak Text” action and customize voice, speed, etc.
5. Connect the Get Contents and Get Text actions.
6. Name the shortcut “Listen to Articles”
7. Enable Share Sheet access so it shows when sharing webpages.

Using the Shortcut

Once you’ve built the shortcut, using it is simple:

1. Open an article or webpage in Safari or Chrome.
2. Tap the share button.
3. Tap the “Listen to Articles” shortcut.
4. Allow access permission initially.
5. The page’s text will start being read aloud immediately.

Now you can listen to any webpage or article! Use this to speed up reading, multitask while listening, or rest your eyes.

Found this useful? Check out more iPhone shortcuts

If you are not an iPhone user here are more ways you can listen to the articles using text to speech {TTS} technology.