Just a few weeks ago at CES, Google previewed a feature that would allow your Android devices to read entire web pages aloud – perfect when you don’t have your hands free to scroll but you always have to catch up on text, or when you no longer want to watch your screen You would say “Hey Google, read this page”, and they would run the Google Assistant neural networks to generate a very accurate reading.
Today, this feature begins to be deployed for all Android users.
Some interesting pieces:
- It will highlight the text and automatically scroll the page as it is read, which will help you keep track of the reading in a story. Google had previously mentioned this feature as a possibility, but they weren’t sure if it would be ready for launch. It’s inside!
- You can change the playback speed if the default values are too slow / fast for you. Perfect for people who listen to podcasts at 3x or other.
- It can translate! If the page you ask the assistant to read is in a language that is not your default language, it can automatically translate more than 40 languages into the language of your choice.
- If you are a webmaster and for whatever reason do not do want the wizard to read a page out loud (as if it contains sensitive information and you don’t want the feature to be accidentally triggered), they built an “No page read aloud” HTML tag that will turn off on a page by page.
Google says this feature should work on just about any modern Android phone going back to Android 5 (Lollipop).
