Automator - Getting the Contents of the Current Selection

I want to be able to make an automator action which does the
following:

1) get the selected text
2) convert it to speech and save it as a sound file

Is there any way of getting Automator to do stuff with text
selections?

I only seem to be able to get it to do stuff with, say, the clipboard
contents. Meaning I have to copy the selection before running the
action.