Play My Emails for Outlook for iOS

If you have an iPhone, there’s a cool new feature in Outlook that will read your emails to you if you want to have a hands-free experience or catch up while you’re commuting. Yeah, I realize that not a lot of people are commuting these days, but play along with me here… It’s called Play My Emails, and here’s how it works…

When you go into Outlook for the first time when this feature hits your application, you’ll see the blue Play My Emails banner. Click on it to go through the setup process:

You get the banner screen to start walking you through the setup:

It lets you know that the Hey Cortana feature on your iPhone needs to be turned on, and it will need access to your microphone:

Outlook also needs access to your microphone:

That’s it! Now you can listen to your emails, either through the iPhone speaker, or through a bluetooth speaker in your car or other location:

And of course, we’d be remiss in not warning against distracted driving and holding your iPhone when you’re using this feature. Please become familiar with the voice commands to keep within the laws of your particular area:

At this point, Cortana sees I have one email and it will start the process of reading it to me:

It shows me who the email is from, as well as the first few words. It will mark the email as complete once it’s read to me:

At the end of the email, it’ll give you a chance to use voice commands to do things such as respond to the email via voice, or to mark it as unread so you can easily see it once you get to a point where you can focus on a response:

This isn’t something you’d likely use to handle all your emails on a regular basis, but it can be a lifesaver if you spend a lot of time on the road and you want to stay current with your emails.