Dear Apple,

Siri’s speech quality improved significantly in iOS 11. But why can’t she read text?

I listen to 12 – 13 hours of podcasts and audiobooks weekly — thanks to smart speed feature in Overcast, it doesn’t take that long. One day I realized that I could listen to any text on the system. It would be nice to listen to news articles, but it would be awesome to listen to an ebook. Listening to synthesized speech is not the best, but new Siri should make it much better, no?

Unfortunately, new Siri doesn’t work for text-to-speech — even though it works for VoiceOver. It is a valid option, but selecting it causes old Siri (Samantha) to speak. After 4 major iOS 11 updates this bug still persists. I hope iOS 12 fixes it.

Why Siri is not available as a text-to-speech option on macOS deserves its own letter.

Best,

--da

PS: There are lucky people who made it work on reddit.