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A few weeks ago I was commiserating about the fact that, being somewhat of a news junkie, I'm subscribed to some RSS feeds, and I'll just read headlines as the feeds refresh themselves, and delete anything that isn't of interest, and keep everything else I intend to read later, as I don't always have time to go through articles "now". And then, the problem is that I was approaching 1000 items in the backlog, going back almost a full year...
Well, it turns out I've "discovered" this feature in Edge (I'm sure it's there in other browsers) that will read the content of web pages aloud--probably some sort of accessibility feature. I know it had been there for a very, very long time, but hadn't looked at it in years.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that text-to-speech nowadays doesn't sound nearly as robotic and monotonous as it did years gone by, so over the last few weeks I just had it go over my backlog and read articles aloud for me, one-by-one, as I'm actually busy doing other stuff. "Reading" in the traditional sense otherwise means monopolizing my time as I have to focus on a page, and can't do anything else...but this being played in the background frees me up, and it's been working out very well as far as I'm concerned...so much so that I will have caught up with the entire 1000+ articles I started at not too long ago, and moving forward, I can absolutely see this taking just a few minutes each week to catch up with new items that have come out that week and I haven't yet deleted.
Give it a go if you haven't and find yourself in this sort of situation. In Edge, the shortcut is Ctrl-Shift-U, otherwise use the ... menu, and Read Aloud in the dropdown.
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I find that having Edge read my articles to me is a great way to catch typos, grammar errors, and general brain-farts.
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."
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I suppose that's another good application. In my case however, it's reading other people's pages, so the typos aren't mine to fix anyway.
It does come up with some strange things every once in a while, and it seems to try to make an effort to be context-aware. For example, if an article is talking about Xi Jinping (and names him as such), it'll read out his name correctly, but I've heard isolated instances where "Mr. Xi" was called out as "Mister Eleven"  which sounds like a Bond villain...
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Xi Jinping is a real life Bind villian.
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Thanks for sharing this bug. The team is looking into this right away. Feel free to report these via Send Feedback option (Alt Shift i) option within the browser next time around. Will make it easier for my team to understand the context and act on it
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As mentioned it seems to depend on what sort of context it has managed to build or infer. Most of the time it's okay, just this one instance caught my attention and it clearly read it back as Mr. Eleven I had it repeat it and it kept repeating the same thing.
In other sentences in the same article however the name was pronounced correctly.
Thanks for the tip re: feedback.
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Does it read the ads and cookie consent popups, etc. as well? :P
- the modern web browsing experience can sometimes really suck.
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It won't, obviously, read any text that's actually part of an image. Lots of ads are designed in exactly that way, so it would skip over those. But, I also use Pi-hole as my ad blocker, so I get very few of them (relatively speaking).
For the most part, my news feed is from the BBC, and the Read Aloud function in Edge is somehow smart enough to immediately jump to the headline, then the content. Once it reaches the end, it starts going over the links at the bottom and right side of the page, but there's nothing of interest once it's reached that point, so that's when I just move onto the next article.
But it's entirely dependent on the page and how it's laid out, I suppose. All I know is that on the BBC's pages, it's not wasting any time, at the start, going over items that are not part of the main article itself.
modified 29-Nov-22 9:16am.
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that's pretty impressive actually
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I know, right?
It's so rare nowadays that I find some software feature that actually does save me time, in a real, measurable way.
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I (briefly) read up on accessibility and have to assume that BBC did a good job with their markup and design which the screen reader looks at to do its job.
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I have very little doubt that's true.
But then, even if the reader starts to go through completely irrelevant stuff like navigation menu items, you can just double-click on a word in a paragraph, and it'll immediately start reading from that point forward.
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You can use Read Aloud within the Immersive Reader feature (look for book with a speaker icon) - Immersive Reader strips out distractions from any webpage and just shows the main content in easily readable page themes. Using Read Aloud within this view will skip reading ads and other popups.
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It’s “now” or never for me, although often I would open an article, start reading through and then switch to something else leaving the article for later reading in a dormant tab
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Calin Negru wrote: leaving the article for later reading in a dormant tab
...and then the browser crashes, and when you restart it, it's one of those tabs that are mysteriously missing... 
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There is always the browser history option , but even so it’s not guaranteed you’ll track down your page if you forgot critical details and have no patience to check every single entry
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I tried this on your post.
You are right, it's very nice. Thanks for the suggestion. 
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Kate-X257 wrote: You are right, it's very nice. Thanks for the suggestion
Awesome. That's exactly why I felt compelled to share this. It's rare nowadays that you discover a feature that can truly save you time.
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The voice options are pretty cool as well. My first language is Afrikaans and you can usually hear when an Afrikaans person speaks English by the accent and they did a good job of capturing that. The same goes for the other accents too.
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Yeah, I played around with those options. I thought the Japanese reader reading english came through pretty much like the real thing.
And the articles from the feed I have it read are from the BBC, so I set it to use a UK accent. Brings it a bit of authenticity. 
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This thread was a good education. I'm glad you brought it up as the idea and possible uses would have escaped me. To be honest though, I was also checking to see if anyone would have mentioned the obvious. Putting text to speech to task reading this post.
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Thanks for your ❤️❤️ for Read Aloud in Microsoft Edge. Will this on to my team that works on learning tools in Edge.
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Right on.
I was just about to make a suggestion - a thought that just occurred to me, but I just found out it's already there.
I was going to suggest allowing the user to highlight a bunch of text, then on right-click, present an option to read only the selection...but I just saw that's actually there!
That'll work great for poorly authored web pages where the browser can't make the distinction between navigation items and the real content that the user probably is interested in. Nice to see you're on the ball.
You have a real opportunity to promote Edge here. This is a great feature, written I'm sure for accessibility reasons, but everyone can benefit from it. A real, tangible, time-saver.
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Conduct GUIDE
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GUIDELINE
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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And why not 'I won' ? 
English helps me to go sooner into the grave  
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