Google Assistant already lets you interact with many gadgets using just your voice to play music, check appointments, get weather forecasts, and much more. Now you can also use it to “read” web pages.
Google has announced a new “OK Google, read this page” option that will let the company’s virtual assistant software read web pages aloud to you when you’re using an Android phone.
Not only will Google Assistant translate text to speech, but it’ll also scroll through the web page as it reads, helping you keep your place and switch from listening to reading at any time.
Google says the new feature supports 42 languages as well as translation. So not only can it read French pages in French, for example, but you can use the translation menu to convert a web page written in French to English and have Google read it aloud to you. Just expect the same sort of translation errors you’re used to seeing in Google Translate… only spoken aloud instead of shown on the page.
Users can choose from a few different reading voices and/or alter the speed to match their preferences.
And web publishers who don’t want their pages to be read aloud by Google Assistant can add a “nopagereadaloud” tag to their websites.
If this actually becomes popular, I am sure it won’t take long for developers to make an extension that removes “nopagereadaloud” tag to allow for reading anywhere.
Then Google will kill the feature a couple of months later.
So what would the prose of not reading aloud be? To make sure the reader sees the ads?
Purpose, not “prose” (despite trying to edit it literally two seconds later it gave me a message that it was “no longer possible”to edit the message).
Can you test this with pornhub?
Report back with results, cheers : )
I suspect that it’s could be used to direct the reading. For example if you put the tag in the sidebar, it’ll skip that…but maybe you can only apply it to a whole web page, I don’t know.
Or maybe it’s to keep website maintainers from getting too angry at google for randomly reading (which implies analyzing) everything on the site via read-aloud requests.
It’s still a massive pain because all things are audible by default and now a webmaster has to go into every single thing on the sections of the site that are only supposed to be accessed by certain people, and add this tag to everything to keep random people from sending google confidential information.
But, you kinda had to expect that google reads anything that a Chrome user accessed anyway (it’s just less legally actionable than google assistant actually reading a page, because you can’t prove what exactly the proprietary parts of Chrome are doing).