At CES 2020, Google announced a new experience is coming for Android users that helps them to listen to web pages. This new accessibility feature read out loud the web pages once a user visits it. All they have to do is ask Google Assistant a command as soon as they open a web page. The command is “Hey Google, Read it“. As soon as a user spoke this command on Google Assistant after visiting a web page, Google Assistant starts dictating the web page in the text to speech form.
Google said that the feature is coming to Android phones later this year supporting Android Version 5 or above. Also, the feature is not becoming limited only to Google Assistant, but one can also able to access it on Google Chrome and Google News App.
Read it feature is accessible in 42 languages, therefore, if a user wants to listen to a web page in some other language, Read it convert the language of the web page in real-time before speaking. Read it grabs the real-time translation feature by taking help from Google Translation while getting its voice from Neural Networks.
While using the “Read it” feature you can also set its playback speed to get the exact dictating speed you like.
Now, coming to the text to speech conversion, this isn’t the new technology. We already heard about it in the past. However, here what unique is, Google said, it is more natural than the regular Screen Readers we are using.
Although the feature is just a preview for now and we can’t be sure about it whether it is launching or not. Anyway, its a great feature if Google brings it to the Google Assistant.
A more similar feature to Read it is the Interpreter mode that was launched last year initially for Google Home Smart Display, but later became available for Phones too.
