Report: Apple will bring text-to-speech conversion to Notes

Apple has filed for a patent for a forthcoming feature that could convert text to speech in its Notes application.

According to Patently Apple, the tech giant filed for the patent in Europe. In the filing that Patently Apple discovered, Apple said it planned a new version of its iOS Notes app that would allow users to first translate text into one of several other languages, and then convert it to speech.

"In the future, Apple's current invention will enable a user to select, from among multiple languages, a language to be used for performing text-to-speech conversion," Patently Apple wrote. "In some embodiments, multiple languages may be displayed to the user. The user may then select a particular language to be used from the multiple languages. The user-selected language may then be used to generate speech for text to be converted to speech."

The "speak" option that is part of the filing would not necessarily be available to users as soon as the language translation tool.