I tried this a while ago and found it extremely buggy. It would skip words and sections and randomly stop reading to the point that it wasn’t worth using. Some googling indicated that it had degraded massively in iOS 16. Maybe I was unlucky in what articles I wanted it to read or some setting somewhere was borking it but I found it utterly terrible, so I am very excited for this feature despite knowing about the existing way to do it (which hopefully will be improved in ios17) the playback controls alone are a really big improvement.
Average reading vs speaking speeds don’t differ by as much as you might think (230 vs 150 wpm), esp if it has speed options for the audio.
Really the use case though is about different brains in different situations being able to process information better (or at all) in different ways (that’s why the previous way of doing this was under “accessibility”)
Listening to a book/article allows you to do manual tasks while consuming the information: driving, housework, gardening, exercising. It also allows you to put your phone down and consume it which can help manage distractions from the phone or from the environment.
alternate means of input like this can be incredibly useful for people who aren’t neurotypical (ADHD, anxiety, autism spectrum) or just people living in modern society.
Excited for this feature and curious if the quality of the reading will be improved over current options. Hoping that making it available more obviously means it’s better.
