On the Mac, text-to-speech is built into the operating system. This means you can highlight just about anything in most programs, right click, and go to Speech->Start Speaking and at once a flat Skynet robot will begin reading to you. As mechanical as the voices tend to be, I’ve found readback an indispensable part of my editing process. I catch spelling errors, strange phrasing, and all sorts of things that just don’t stand out on the written page.

Furthermore, writing is currently a backseat passenger in this runaway train that is my life, so I am often trying to squeeze it in amidst other things. The fact the computer can read to me while my attention is (ostensibly) on other things is fantastic and it lets me get some actual utility out of various chores, such as cleaning the dishes, cooking, etc.

Mobile

I’ve kicked out a couple blogs about Scrivener for iOS. Long story short, most of my writing is on mobile (iPad specifically). Were it not for the mobile app, I’d get hardly a word down these days. For a long time this has meant no more readbacks, or so I thought!

Turns out the same functionality is available on iOS, it just takes a few steps to turn on.

To begin, navigate to your Settings -> General -> Accessibility

Then find the menu item called Speech

Turn on “Speak Selection” then click on “Highlight Content.”

Here, choose to highlight both sentences and words. This is very helpful when you hear your device read something wrong and you need to see where it is in the text to correct it.

Finally, you can click on voices if you want to adjust how the robot sounds. I’m reasonably happy with Samantha Enhanced (which is a separate download, all managed right from the voices screen. The enhanced version has a bit more natural tonal variation as she speaks).

How to use it

Ok! Your iPad or iPhone is ready to go. Using the feature is simple. Pull up Scrivener and press and hold to get the context menu, then select all for the chapter/scene you want to hear (or highlight just the part you need).

Now you may notice a new option comes up in the context menu called “Speak.” Go ahead and give that a tap, and you’re off to the races:

As you can see it highlights the sentences as it goes, with the currently spoken word in blue.

Pronunciation

I found one other cool trick with this feature. I noticed it doesn’t say some of my made up words properly — an unsurprising problem, in a fantasy book. If you return to the “Speech” screen under Settings->General->Accessibility, you will notice at the bottom is a section called “Pronunciation.” Click into there.

What this lets you do is enter words and provide a phonetic spelling for the readback to use instead. I did it for one of my main characters, as well as an in-world term I created for doctors, both of which the default voice botches.

To add one of your own, hit the little (+) icon and you get a screen like below. Put the word as it will be found in your Manuscript in the “phrase” section, then under substitution, enter the same word phonetically. Use the “Play” button in the upper right to test it out until you get it right. Once this is setup, the readback will use these pronunciations automatically as it moves through your Scrivener documents. Quick aside: I’ve noticed the sentence highlighting sometimes gets quirky when it hits a word for which you’ve defined a replacement. I’d keep this feature’s use to a minimum.

Hopefully someone out there finds this helpful.

All right then, back to procrastinating!