Hands-On Tech 225 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Hands-On Tech. Let's take a look at how to get our phone to read our emails out loud. If that's something you want to do, stay tuned for this episode of Hands-On Tech.

Hello and welcome to Hands-On Tech, the show where I, Mikah Sargent, take your tech questions and do my best to answer them. I think I do a pretty good job. I hope I do. If you have tech questions that you would like answered, hot@twit.tv is how you get in touch with me. I love that. That rhymes, and we are looking at an interesting question today that comes in from Bob. So Bob writes in and says the following this seems so obvious and simple that I wonder if I'm overlooking something, but I can't figure it out. Is there an iOS app that can read my emails to me while I'm driving? Maybe works with voice commands like next, previous, delete, et cetera? Surely I can't be the only one who wants this type of app. Does it already exist and I've just overlooked it? Thank you, bob.

I have some bad news for you to kick things off, because I thought too.

This does seem like something that should be by default, and in a way it is, but it used to be the case that it was a built-in feature of a certain third-party app. Outlook Mobile had this feature built in, called Play my Emails, and it would. You hit the play button. It was in the main part of the app and it would read your emails out loud to you. Unfortunately, Microsoft discontinued this feature in June of last year. Why, I don't know. Part of it may have been because it was Cortana that was the voice for the email reading, but for whatever reason, Microsoft removed this feature from Outlook Mobile. So, without that feature available via Outlook Mobile, let's talk about some other ways to go about getting your phone to read your email to you. I couldn't find outside of Outlook, and I think that that's part of the problem is that Outlook's once ability to do so has sort of clouded the field when you're trying to find other apps to do so. I couldn't find another email application that had this feature built in by default, or an app that would give you the functionality that you're looking for, which it sounds like is something that's actually going to get at your email and then read it to you, not something where you would have to like copy and paste your email into it before you because that's something very easy to do. You could copy and paste your email into one of many great applications that are sort of accessibility minded for reading text out loud. But I know that that's not what you're after. You want something that's an email application first and foremost. So here's the good news. There is a feature that's built in. There is a feature that's built in.

Siri can read your email to you. You can say the name of your virtual assistant and then say read my emails. You can also say check my email from, and then name a specific person or a specific contact name, and then you can also ask do I have any new email? When you do, Siri is going to read the sender, is going to read the subject line and is going to tell you the date and time of that most recent email, and in modern versions of iOS, we'll also provide a summary. Afterward, Siri will ask if you'd like the full message read. If you say yes, then Siri will go through and read the full message. Afterwards, Siri prompts you with follow-up. You can say reply, which then it will ask you what you want to say back. You can say archive, you can say delete and, with it built in to your phone. It also means that if you use CarPlay, it's going to work well with that functionality as well. So in that way, yeah, it's kind of what you want. I think the problem that you might struggle with there is how long it takes for Siri to read through and the sort of the way that everything's kind of locked into place. But that's the only way that you're going to get full access to all of the text that's in the email, because the other option is a more umbrella option, I guess, and that is with accessibility. So if you don't want to have Siri read your email to you and sort of have that back and forth situation where you're attempting to get it to respond to you and you have to wait for it to say OK, what do you want to do next? And you're having that struggle.

There's also built in functionality for iOS via accessibility controls called Speak Screen, and you access that by launching Settings, tapping on Accessibility, tapping on Spoken Content and then going to Speak Screen. When you get there, you toggle that on and once you've enabled it, it automatically enables a little shortcut gesture that you do, where you take two fingers and swipe down from the top of the screen. Now, to be clear, it's as if you're accessing your notifications, your control center, whatever you think of as that swipe down, but with two fingers, and when it does that, it will read whatever is on your screen. So in that way, you are able to then have it read your email. If you have your email up on screen and what's good about the accessibility features is you can change the speed at which it reads.

So where you might get tired of hearing Siri very slowly work its way through your email, adding proper emphasis and sort of trying to sound like a human being, this is just going to go through either at a slower speed or a faster speed, depending on what you're wanting, and I find that to be what I want, because I get a little impatient waiting for it to respond. However, it's just reading what's on your screen. So if you are driving and tapping on your phone to open up the next email and then tapping to open up the next email, that's not necessarily a safe practice and it also means that it's not going to work through your email automatically. It also means that by default, it's only going to read the name and subject, whatever that main mail list does. Whatever that main mail list does. So really, Siri is the better choice because of the fact that it's able to access the full email, get in there and read it back to you.

The real great choice would have been Outlook back whenever it had that feature, and I'm really sad that that's gone now, because it sounds like it's exactly what you were hoping for and what, provided you know the best way to kind of read your emails out loud while you're driving. Yeah, there is technically a third option, which is to use a shortcut that you build to kind of check the email, pull the subject out, read the sub, or rather, not pull the subject out, but pull the subject and the body of the email and read it. Complicated and so messy because email bodies may contain extra information and so suddenly you're getting weird XML and stuff that's involved in that. So I think, bob, my official and final and true advice for you is just use Siri to read your email out loud to you while you're in the car. I think that that's the simplest, most interactive and most full-featured way of making your way through your email. So thank you, bob, for writing in with that question. Please be safe on the road and I hope that one of those solutions works well for you. Again, rip the old version of Outlook that offered this feature. I don't know why. I don't know why they got rid of it.

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Folks, if you have questions for me, you can send an email hot@twit.tv. That's how you get in touch. Make sure to include all the information you might think is necessary, and maybe even some you don't think is necessary, but I might find necessary. It's always great to overload me with info rather than underload with info, where we're missing details. So I'd love to hear from you. Hot at twittv. That brings us to the end of this episode of Hands on Tech. I'll be back next week for another episode. Thanks, bye-bye.

0:12:13 - Leo Laporte
No matter how much spare time you have, twit.tv has the perfect tech news format for your schedule. Stay up to date with everything happening in tech and get tech news your way with twit.tv. Start your week with this Week in Tech for an in-depth, comprehensive dive into the top stories every week and for a midweek boost, Tech News Weekly brings you concise, quick updates with the journalists breaking the news. Whether you need just the nuts and bolts or want the full analysis, stay informed with twit.tv's perfect pairing of tech news programs