I have never liked sitting still to read long articles or books. Humans evolved to think best when moving around. We were never meant to sit at desks all day.
Unfortunately, most of the best content is still text-based. Audio learning is progressing with audiobooks and podcasts (and soon Avocado audio courses), but until then we need an audio workaround for text.
Audio has massive benefits over text. We have a lot more listening time than reading time. Between meetings. Walking to a restaurant. Pop in your AirPods and you have countless opportunities to listen to something.
Enter “Alex”. Alex is my digital assistant with a high-quality voice that’s always in my ear. He reads any books or articles I want.
The best thing: Alex comes free with iOS.
Setting Up “Alex"
To activate “Alex” on an iPhone go to Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content. Then turn on Speak Selection and Speak Screen. Speak Selection lets you highlight text and select speak. I use Speak Screen which lets you easily read anything on the screen by swiping down with two fingers from the top of the screen.
On the Spoken Content screen you want to go into Voices and under English select “Alex”. “Alex” is by far the most realistic sounding computer voice, which is why he is a relatively large download (approaching 1GB).
Now you have a text-to-voice superpower that works across the operating system.
Uses for “Alex”
Kindle Books - Instead of spending a fortune on audiobooks, you can use Alex. Swipe down, leave the screen open and the pages change automatically. Alex isn’t Morgan Freeman, but what you lose in the human touch, you gain in the ability to highlight text to remember for later.
Instapaper/Pocket - I save most things I want to read to Instapaper so I can highlight them as I go. Alex also works with the reader view in Safari if you don’t care about highlighting. Some of these read later apps have their own text-to-voice, but Alex works on all of them. Long articles are best saved for when you can read in their entirety because it isn’t easy to start halfway in.
Proofreading - I am prone to typing errors and I am not great at catching them when reading through on a screen. My ear is excellent at catching them though. Misspelled words are said incorrectly by Alex. Grammar errors are instantly obvious when read aloud.
Writing - Writing on the internet should actually be written closer to the spoken word. Varied sentence lengths. Plain language. Basically everything we are taught in school is bad form. Text-to-speech trains you to write in a pleasing fashion because you actually hear it read back to you.
Happy listening and learning!