Voice Brief, an iPhone app that’s free until this afternoon in the App Store, aims at enabling you to listen to information coming from your social networks, email inbox and more through text-to-speech technology. Voice Brief, available only on the iPhone for now, can plug into Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, RSS feeds as well as Weather and Stock Prices to “speak” rather than simply displaying information.
How does it work? You choose the voices you want in the Settings (announcer voice for when the app switches sections, reporter voice to read status updates and news), set the speed and then you add new contents. You can log in Twitter and Facebook from within the app and set the amount of tweets and updates to fetch, manually enter RSS sources (there’s no Google Reader support) and set other details for your location, and so forth. Once the contents you need are in place, the main page of Voice becomes a dashboard with a summary of all your events (Calendar integration is also supported), social activity, emails and news. Hit the play button, and all this information will be spoken out loud by the app. Voice quality is good, sometimes above iOS’ default text-to-speech capabilities, sometimes below average iPhone quality. Overall, I’ve found Voice Brief to perform very well with regular English sentences, but of course the app fails badly at Italian contents and status updates containing very specific terms like tech products and acronyms (very common in my Twitter timeline).
Voice Brief is an interesting project that’s worth checking out, for sure. I can see some people using an app like this in their car while driving to the office in the morning. Go download it here while the offer is still valid.
