Almost instant podcasts with Edge and Read aloud

Immersive Reader and Read Aloud reading an article to me.

So, one of the things that I’ve been doing a lot lately is actually listening to various articles that I find interesting from my various news sources. I usually will have them on in background while I sit on the futon in my office when I feel the need to not stare at a screen or to rest my eyes.

For example, in the morning I enjoy flipping through the Morning Brew newsletter that shows up every day in my inbox. It’s a well put together snapshot of various news happening across business, politics and tech. There are even pop culture references sprinkled in their synopsis’ that can make you chuckle as you click the link to the broader story.

Immersive Reader & Read Aloud feature in Edge.

Which is where the Read Aloud feature comes in to play. Let’s take this article from the newsletter a few days ago about The Future of Cities. Now, I could have sat at my desk and read it like I would do any other article out there but I was aching for a break and decided that this would be better suited for me to listen to it instead.

My workflow turns out to be like this:

1. Set my Focus Assist to Alarms Only
2. Load up the article of my choosing into a tab in Edge.
3. Hit F9 which will then load the page into the Immersive Reader view.
4. Click the Read aloud to have Edge start reading the article to me.
5. Sit (or more likely, lay) on my futon until the end.

For the most part this works great and is built right into the browser I use everyday.