With a new puppy in the house, I'm sort of getting used to going on dog walks, and while Music and Overcast are usually my tools of choice to keep me entertained, I'm happy to learn about other options. As I was getting ready to set out for our morning walk I looked at my phone and came across this blog post on Mastodon that looked interesting. I popped it over to Safari with the thought that I'll get back to it around lunch time or whenever I have a free minute.

I was reminded by a tweet or two from Henri Helvetica from a couple of years ago where he mentioning that he likes to listen to web pages sometimes and I wondered if I could make that work today. I remember trying this out on desktop Safari in the past and I think it was maybe an accessibility feature that let you select text and read it back to you. I remember liking the idea at first, but not liking that when you tried to do something else on your Mac you'd lost focus on what was being read and would have to set it back up again to continue. That feature just didn't really click for me after a few attempts at it.

I don't know when this was added to iOS, but today on mobile Safari I noticed that in the same menu that you use to trigger Reader Mode there's a button, labeled “Listen to Page”. This feature is pretty simple in that once you hit that button Siri just starts to read the article from top to bottom. I headed out for my dog walk with the blog post playing in my headphones and I noticed a few things:

  • You can leave Safari while the audio continues to play. Just like listening to a podcast, you can jump to another app, put your phone to sleep, and control the audio using the system controls (including pause and play via AirPods).
  • Siri sounds much more natural than before! Inflection and handling of punctuation sound great. The only time where I felt it didn’t sound right was when I was testing it on another blog post and I noticed it had an issue with some product names (which is not unexpected).
  • Basically I think whatever text makes it into Reader Mode is what you are hearing when you use this feature. I think Reader Mode is pretty good at filtering out unnecessary page content, but I haven’t used it often enough to know if you'd be missing anything with this setup.
Safari listen to page controls

I think the ability to open up a blog post and have it play just like a podcast will allow me to squeeze in more learning in places where I wouldn’t have done so before. I like the idea of being able to have a page on MDN read to me while I’m cleaning snow off of my driveway or when mowing the lawn.

In the past I would normally wait until lunch or nighttime to catch up on RSS, but ever since I've started using Tapestry for RSS I find myself reading articles throughout the day or adding them to Safari to queue them up for later downtime. After this experience today I think my habits are going to change in a big way.

Epilogue

This whole thing has me thinking about a few more things:

  • Having AI tools in iOS for proofreading is fine, but having my own blog post read back to me might be a really good way to catch errors or weird grammar problems.
  • This reminds me of the Bespoken product that John Morton had created a Craft CMS plugin around. The idea is that you send your article text to Bespoken’s AI platform and it would provide you with an audio file you can embed onto your website. While you might say that with this Safari feature you might not need something like Bespoken, but 1. not everyone uses Safari, and 2. a thing I liked that John had presented was the ability to train the AI to correctly pronounce words and proper nouns or the ability to describe elements that wouldn’t make it into Reader Mode.
  • Speaking of AI, this also might sound similar to Google’s NotebookLM product. I’ve listened to a few samples from NotebookLM and while I can see this being useful for aggregating lots of text, I would rather hear the original text as written in a blog post. If for nothing else, I feel like Siri is more genuine than the NotebookLM characters.