Voice Brief Reads The Important Stuff To You, And Helps Japan
Voice Brief ($1.99) by Dong Baik is an app for your iPhone that delivers information important to you with "state of the art text to speech."
We go through tons of bits of information every day, but to do so, we usually have to actively be consuming it. But have you ever wanted to hear your social network updates, Gmail messages, weather, stocks, and news feeds? Now you can, with Voice Brief.
Voice Brief allows you to import your information from your social networks (Twitter/Facebook), Gmail, weather, news, stocks, calendar events, and any RSS feeds you'e interested in. Each item has its own level of customization as far as how many items are pulled and displayed on Voice Brief's main screen, which is nice to have. You can even add a custom sentence to be read if you prefer.
Once you have all of your stuff added, you can choose the voices for the Announcer and Reporter. The Announcer is the voice that will announce names and the like, while the Reporter is the one that actually says what was in the tweet, Facebook update, email body, etc. It's a nice way to differentiate the information from each other, which you wouldn't really get if it was the same monotone as found in other similar apps. Both the Announcer and Reporter have four voices to choose from.
Another nice thing is that you can customize how fast the voice reads with a slider. The ends of the slider are symbolized with a tortoise and a hare, which is a nice touch. So you can have one voice read faster than the other to speed things up, or just have them at the same pace (default is 50% for both).
Once you have everything set up the way you want, everything will be displayed on the main screen of Voice Brief. This is where your feeds will appear in order of which they were added (this can also be rearranged manually from the Settings).
For Facebook and Twitter, your account info with latest post will be shown at the top, and the allotted number of posts from your friends will be shown below. There is an arrow at the the bottom that will pull up your standard media player controls. To start the text to speech stream, you'll have to hit Play.
The announcer will read off names and other important headings, while the reporter will tell you what the information is. It's a nice way to get your information passively, without having to always jump from app to app and actively looking at the screen for information.
If you are actually looking at the app while using it, then you may find the included in-app browser to be handy for all those links that you'll come across in Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, and news feeds.
Voice Brief also supports full multitasking, so you can still get all your information even if you leave the app! It works like any other audio player would.
I can already think of a great way to use this app - in your car, so you don't threaten the lives of others. Just one idea, along with many other possibilities.
The interface for Voice Brief is slick and it's a great, simple way to get all your information read to you without needing to do anything besides listen. However, I think it would be good to include a way to have multiple streams to choose from - different collections of sources to switch between for different commutes, instead of a single "universal" stream. Current support is for English only - hopefully more language support is added in the future for those that would need it.
Despite these minor missing features, Voice Brief is a great app to have.
Another reason to get the app is that the developer is also donating 100% of his profits from the purchase of Voice Brief in March to help fund the relief efforts in Japan due to the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami, and the ongoing nuclear crisis. So when you get the app, you're also helping Japan.
So get Voice Brief now and knock out two birds with one stone - a great productivity app and contribute to Japan.
