Make Your iPhone Read Any Text Aloud

iOS 5 came with a few hidden features that we’ve been discovering over time, and one is that it can read almost any text to you. This feature is disabled by default, but after enabling it you can have your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch speak pretty much any text aloud.

To enable this feature, follow these steps or (watch the video above for a demonstration):

1. Open the Settings app on your home screen.
2. Tap the General tab.
3. Scroll down and tap the Accessibility tab.
4. Tap the Speak Selection option (it should be set to off by default).
5. Tap the toggle switch to turn it on. You can also adjust the rate of speech as well. It’s worth noting, however, that the default is already pretty fast. If anything, you might want to slow it down.

Once you’ve got Speak Selection enabled, just highlight any text like you would if you were going to copy it but tap the “Speak” button instead. This option will change to “Pause” while the text is being spoken so you can stop it at any point. Pretty cool!