Voice Brief: Listen To Emails, Weather & News Updates Even When Offline [iPhone]
Sometimes you are too lazy to do stuff which is important, and even your smartphone needs a touch of your hand to perform various tasks. Also, you might need to perform some functions while you are driving or doing something else in real-life. This is when voice commands come in really handy, and similarly, it is always nice if your phone can read things aloud for you, so that your attention can remain free of the screen (that’s one reason for Siri’s popularity). So, if you have an iPhone, life becomes a lot easier when you have apps like Voice Brief. This extremely useful app reads out a bunch of things aloud, like emails, stock prices and weather updates, and the best part is that you can load all these items once, and then listen to the feeds even when you are offline, as the app doesn’t require an active data connection for converting text to speech.
If you are new to Voice Brief, you will be directed to the app’s settings page, so that you can personalize the items which will be handled by the app. Each item that can be added to the app has its own menu for configuration. You can link your Facebook, Twitter, GMail and Google Reader accounts with Voice Brief. There are also many other available options, like Custom Sentence, in which you can write any phrase which you want to be read out during the app’s monologue. Other items which you can add to your personal feed in Voice Brief include stock prices and your iPhone or iPad’s calendar. You can change the order of items in the Contents section, and it is also possible to remove any item you might have added from there. Voice brief has 4 voices on offer, 2 male and 2 female, and it is possible to choose any of them for reading out your feeds.
Voice Brief is designed to work like a radio, and that is why a background music is played all the while the added items are being read. It is possible to turn the music off, but overall, it gives a nice effect to the feed. You can skip any item from the personalized feed in the app by using the previous and next buttons. If you have chosen to link your Reader account to the app, you can even share the news items over Facebook, Twitter or via mail. Voice Brief will also let you view any Reader item in a browser of its own.
Voice Brief can continue reading your personal feed even if you are offline, as long as the items were loaded on last update, and the reading part keeps working under lockscreen as well. For all this positives, Voice Brief has a rather big drawback; its download size is 255MB! Apart from that, the app is perfect, and you can get for free for a limited time by heading to the download link below.
