One of the nice updates in Safari for iOS 17 is the ability to now listen to a page – for example getting Siri to read that page for you.

Now, from my experience this works on any website where the Reader Mode would work before.

If you haven’t remembered, Reader Mode is accessible from the address bar on the website and when you tap on the two A’s you get the option to go into Reader Mode.

This gets rid of adverts, clutter, distractions and it gives you a really nice reading experience.

This is the text that Siri will read to you as well – it’s not going to read all the hyperlinks and articles and all other stuff around the page.

So we’ll come out of Reader Mode and press the two A’s again and now we have the option to Speak Page and this is what happens when you press it…

[Siri] “Intoxicating: Bruce Springsteen at BST Hyde Park reviewed. Springsteen is still the most magnetic performer imaginable…”

As you can hear, Siri is reading the article for me!

And the great thing is if I leave the website, if I come out of Safari completely, it will keep playing in the background as background audio.

I can tap and hold the Dynamic Island or use a Control Center to pause this audio, and you’ll see it’s almost like a music track.

It’s three and a half minutes long, that’s because the whole article is ready to go and you can listen to it when you need to.

You also have some more options inside of Safari to change how the article is read to you…

If I tap the content in the bottom toolbar I then have listening controls as an option.

From here I can change the speed at which it is read to me, I can make it read twice as quickly I wanted to, and I can also then stop and pause and resume from here as well.

This is a really nice little update to Safari that will make web pages much more accessible to everyone – and it’s just another way iOS 17 has improved your phone.