In one of Nick Bilton’s recent Snapchats he mentioned an iOS feature that was new to me. It’s not a default setting, so to enable it you’ve got to go into Settings, then General, then Accessibility, then Speech. Enabling “Speak Selection” turns on Siri’s ability to read you highlighted text. An example of what that looks like from my Pocket is above.

This probably seems somewhat trivial, especially since Siri still sounds so robotic. But I’ve already been having Siri read me many longer articles. A simple example is Siri reading a long form article aloud while I’m cleaning myself up in the morning or loading the dishwasher.

And it’s not hard to imagine how natural this can become when Siri starts sounding more human and as the feature develops. I can imagine in a few years being able to ask Siri to “read me the top New York Times headlines” and as it cycles through those headlines instructing, “alright, read me that article.”