Apple has included the text to speech feature in its OS for a long time now. I’ve played with it from time to time over the years, but never really found a use for it in any of my workflows.
But today, I think that I may have found a perfect use case: reading draft blog posts back to me. I use Byword for writing blog posts with iCloud syncing to ensure I have everything everywhere. Now I jump into the preview mode to hide all of the markup and have the Mac read the post back to me.
The API must exist on iOS as part of the accessibility API for the visually impaired, but I think that it’s a private API. I’m hoping that the next generation of Siri will open this up a bit.