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Fun with the Siri feature in iOS 11.x to read to you
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I read this article today. Just wanted see if it would work in Pythonista. Ie. reading a ui.WebView back to you. It does work. For example, if you are on iOS11x and run the script below and do a 2 finger pull from the top of the screen the iOS speech controller shows up.
When just trying it, say in Safari, it becomes clear about its limitations or frustrations. Your choice in IOS settings is about reading the whole screen or the hilited text. My example I used here is not too bad for full screen reading. The Pythonista 3 Website. But if you go to say a news website, it wants to read all the crap when in read all screen mode. Also to just read the hilited text is not so great on an ios device as its very difficult to hilite blocks you are interested in(maybe there are some tricks for this I dont know about).
Anyway, I was thinking a smart one out there could maybe use BeautifulSoup etc... to look at what is important about the page (using tags etc, or other magic) and hilite the appropriate blocks. Basically, having what is read to you is only the article, not ads, picture captions etc...Anyway, this is not important. I just could imagine this would appeal to some of the programmers out there.
import ui _url = 'http://omz-software.com/pythonista/' class MyClass(ui.View): def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs): super().__init__(*args, **kwargs) self.make_view() def make_view(self): wv = ui.WebView(frame=self.bounds) wv.load_url(_url) self.add_subview(wv) if __name__ == '__main__': f = (0, 0, *ui.get_screen_size()) v = MyClass(frame=f) v.present(style='panel', animated=False)
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By the way, the two-finger-pull-down screen reading feature is not new in iOS 11. I just tried it on my iOS 9 iPad mini and it works here as well, though I don't remember if it's on by default or if I turned it on in the accessibility settings at some point.
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@dgelessus, thanks for the info. I thought iOS could read to you for sometime. I just hadn't tried to do it before. I mis read the article that I linked to. It appears the emphasis was on iOS 11 in terms of more natural sounding Siri voices rather than the functionality.
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Hmmm, well there is a trick here that I missed/forgot. Just use the reader mode in safari and you get a pretty good rendered page for Siri to read out. I used to use reader mode a lot, these days, I dont visit that many websites as I normally get what i need via some app. A lot to remember :(
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@Phuket2, yes, this feature is really more a Voice Over accessibility feature than Siri, and has been around for a while. I used to hope that it would be useful as a way to effectively turn e-books to audiobooks, but it turned out to be useless to me as it gets confused between languages if, say, the book is in English but your device language is something else.
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@mikael , yeah I seen some bad reports about language handling. Sometimes, well a lot of the time its hard to figure out Apple's strategy regarding certain products. It seems like with both Siri and Apple TV they really dropped the ball big time. I really love my Apple TV, but in both these spaces (Home assistant/media player) for whatever reason they appeared they had a chance to dominate the market, but sat on their hands. I still think they will come through eventually, I just hope its fast enough. The market is getting tough. Sorry if my post seems like off on a tangent, but its all related in my view.