The Buggy Screen Speaker in iOS

ok, so in ios (8+) you go into settings→accessibility→speech and flip a couple of switches to turn on siri reading more or less any screen/page to you:

to summon it up, you invoke the siri voice command thing, and say “speak screen”. it’s quite cool. it even works on the kindle app, and even turns a page for you. however it needs a lot of improvement in that app as it is not good at adding a pause to heading/paragraph boundaries.

however invoking the thing is infuriatingly hard for this englishman with a us iphone. four times out of five it hears me say “speak screen” and corrects it (as i watch it) to “speak scream”, then this page pops up …

… and siri reads it: “i have found quite a number of movies matching scream, scream, and scream blackula scream. there are more, shall i read them all?”

this is effing useless – no one on earth alive, or yet to be born, will ever need to “speak scream”. apple (or your backend partner) – just hard-code the deletion of this “correction” and the resulting page. i try to game it buy saying “speak screeeeeennnnnn” and maybe it sticks. if i put on an effected american accent, it still does the same for me – it feels like very fine line between what i want and this stupid page. i sound like an idiot on the busy streets of new york repeating that every ten yards. luckily i have headphones in so siri doing the “quite a number of movies” routine to me for others on the street to hear.

of course, you could just use a two-finger drag down from the very top of the screen to invoke the screen speaker, but that is a two-handed operation and not quite as entertaining for a blog entry.