Tech Tip -- 7 Cool Tips You Can Use With iOS17 on Your iPhone or iPad
The new iOS17 has been out for a few months now and while we’ve discussed some highlight new features, I thought I would share some lesser known updates that can be quite helpful for many users. I tried to cover an wider variety of likely lesser known enhancements made by Apple that will work on your iPhone or iPad, and many even carry over to Macs if you have one. Let’s jump in.
Live Speech and Personal Voice Feature
Live Speech is a new feature in iOS17 that allows your device (iPhone, iPad, or Mac) to speak written words for you in messages, phone or FaceTime calls, and in-person conversations. This can be activated in the General> Accessibility> Live Speech menu. Toggle Live Speech on to use it. To activate, you press the right side button three times quickly and dialogue box will appear to type your phrase you want spoken. Press ‘send’ and your phrase is read aloud from your device.
You can take this a step further with Personal Voice. This allows you to combine the Live Speech function with your own voice. Setting this up is found in the same place as above, and the Personal Voice function appears just below the Live Speech option. This feature was designed as an accessibility feature to help people who may be at risk of losing their voice. The user can read through a series of about 150 phrases, and the iPhone will then build a simulation of your actual voice. Thus, it preserves what the owner sounds like and can then read ‘live speech’ phrases in that voice. I can also see this being a useful feature if you want to add your voice to a video or presentation that you will be sharing, but do not like to record yourself speaking. You could type your comments and allow your phone to add your voice for you.
Siri read articles
If listening to content (i.e., audiobooks and podcasts) is more your thing, you can have Siri read articles to you easily now also. You don’t have to save this to another service or even your read later option. On the article you want to read from the web, simply tap the ‘Aa’ icon in the menu bar at the bottom and the option list for that page will come up. You can then select ‘listen to page’ and Siri will read the article to you. This can be a great way to catch up on articles you find and want to catch up while driving in the car. Combine with the Safari ‘read later’ option, and you can essentially have a reading list to have Siri read on longer drives.
Manage Storage Better
When you find your iPhone filling up with different data points, you may need to manage your storage and offload some applications or saved items. You can access the information you to do that here: Storage > General > iPhone storage. In iOS 17 you can now sort by size, name, and date. Date is a great option to use. This allows you to see when you last used the app. It will make it easier to identify apps that no longer get used or are used less often. That may make it easier to save storage space on your phone when you need to make choices.
Quickly paste links into text
Apple has allowed you to paste links into emails and other applications for some time. However, the ease of that has not been ideal. You would have to tap, use the context menu to select ‘add link’ and then it would create the hyperlink within the selected text. Now, you can copy the link and simply paste in the text you want to hold the link. This is especially helpful for embedding links in emails. It removes an extra step from the ‘add link’ function, and for iPads where you may have a keyboard attached, it makes the keyboard shortcut faster to use.
Take Level Photos
iOS 17 has introduced a new option to show that your photo is level before you take it. It seems like that should have always been there before, and arguably, if you use the ‘grid’ function for the camera, you probably take level pictures. This simply adds another level (pun intended) to that. You can find this setting at General > Camera > Level. This is a simple function that will help with your photo taking and doesn’t create an intrusive overlay on the screen. It is a simple line that shows whether your phone is level and will capture a straight picture.
Change the Action Button Options
This is only available on the new iPhone 15 Pro versions, but is a nice customization feature for sure. And, I would expect that all new iPhones will get this next year. We have options to get quickly into applications from the Lock Screen through a widget. Sometimes, though, you want to get somewhere even faster. The new action button (above the volume buttons) on the new iPhone allows you to choose what the button does. This replaces the old ringer toggle to silence your phone, and that is the default setting for the action button as well. Press it to toggle between silent mode and ring mode. Apple has built in several options for you to select from. Personally, I have switched that to opening the Camera application. It makes it one step easier to get quickly to being able to capture a picture. No taps to the screen, just a click and I am in. It can be set up to do many different things, including run a Shortcut, which essentially makes it able to open any application or function on your phone. Very handy. My only hope is that in time a double click or even a triple click will give us even more options for using this new button.
Hopefully, you can find one or more of these being helpful for you and how you work. Some, like managing storage better, may be a once a while option, but the others can have daily practical use. They are smaller things, such as the action button, that really can add a nice quality of life enhancement for using your iPhone each day.
Which feature do you like most? Which of them will you put to use?
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