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Tip: Google can read out loud almost any story on your Android phone
Just say 'Hey Google, read it.'
The internet is filled with great written content, but sometimes, you just don't have the time to read everything yourself. That's where a handy but rather hidden Google Assistant feature comes in. When you invoke the Assistant while looking at an article and say something like "Read it," "Read this page," or "Read it to me," it will give you an audiobook version of the content you're seeing. You can even try that with the text right here.
You probably forgot the Assistant could read websites to you, but the feature just got a new look
It can't do anything new, but it has a new monochrome look with outline icons
Google constantly experiments with the UI of its applications. While some changes go down well with users, others — like the recent redesign of the YouTube resolution picker — spark criticism. The latest product to get a makeover is Google Assistant's web page reading tool that reads articles and other text on websites out loud for you.
About a year ago, Google rolled out a new capability to Android devices that lets you ask for any webpage or Google News article to be read aloud. The feature, which uses Assistant, is perfect if you want to put your phone away, but still check out some interesting content, from Wikipedia to a random website or your favorite news sources. It even translates pages on the fly from 42 languages! What the feature lacked, though, was a larger choice of reading languages and accents. The former is still not available, but the latter is improving.
Tell Google Assistant to 'Read It,' including webpages translated from 42 languages
Text-to-speech is getting way better with syntax and expression
The ways we experience media on the web tend to be designed only for the publisher's intended medium. You don't consume videos just for their sound, for example, and podcasts don't often come with word-for-word transcripts, but there are ways of enjoying those pieces of content with augmentation. Some of the toughest challenges in making text sites cross-consumable via dictation has been in naturalizing machine voices and translating stories rich in grammatical tapestry from other languages. Google Assistant is now bringing its answers to those challenges with new text-to-speech functionality available today.
As part of its CES announcements, Google is taking the wraps off a bunch of new and upcoming Assistant functionality, like the ability to schedule actions, a new "Read It" command that dictates text content like news in a more natural voice, plus new Smart Display features like sticky notes and speed dial. While much of it won't land until a nebulous date "later this year," it gives us a peek at what to expect from the Assistant in 2020, and a reference for when Google re-announces half of it as new later once it's been in silent public testing for a couple months.