Make Spoken Audio From Text

Speaking text is a function of Shortcuts that I’ve always adored because it’s also very cool – and just practical as a way to hear words you’ve written as if they were spoken by someone else.
Now, Shortcuts allows users to actually generate an audio file of what’s essentially Siri speaking your text, passing out a playable track of your words that can be used as audio anywhere.
Basically, you can type directly into what becomes a dictated speech, giving you a mini podcast of what you wrote or like having an AI generate a personalized report of anything you can create with Shortcuts.
I could basically have spoken audio versions of this very article made available via Shortcuts, or do an entire auto-generated podcast of my newsletter without ever opening my mouth (albeit spoke by Siri or Fred on the Mac).
This has been a common request to go alongside Speak Text and Dictate Text, so it’s wonderful to see this come not only to Shortcuts for Mac from Automator, but also to iPhone and iPad for the first time.