The Good
- Integrates with Facebook and Twitter
- Custom stock quotes
- Easy to use
The Bad
- News summaries are short
- Voices are slightly robotic
Voice Brief (US$1.99) is an interesting new app that has the potential to be a busy professional’s best friend. It uses a unique text-to-voice process to read you the latest headlines, your current stock quotes, and even your Facebook or Twitter feeds. I put the app to the test to see if Voice Brief is worth a download.
Listen to your Twitter feed
Voice Brief is a rather large app (235 MB), so you’ll want to be connected to a Wi-Fi connection to get started (it took me about 10 minutes to download over a strong Wi-Fi signal). Why such a large app? The developer says the voices are synthesized on your iPhone -- rather than on an external server -- to keep from eating up your data bandwidth. Good to know.
The first step to using Voice Brief is to determine what you want to hear. Tap ‘Edit Contents’ to add feeds. Some of the options include your calendar, the iPhone weather app, specific stock prices, Twitter, and Facebook. You can also choose news feeds from any source with an RSS feed, including CNN and Fox News. Voice Brief will also read summary lines from emails in your Gmail account, but sadly, Apple Mail is not an option due to Apple restrictions.
Under the settings menu, you can choose both a main announcer and reporter voice (which reads quotations). There are four options to choose from, including two American females, one American male, and a British male. I love accents, so I chose Graham, the British guy. You can also adjust the speed of both voices using a slider. All of the voices sound pretty good, although they are slightly robotic.
News summaries are short
Once your settings are dialed in, the audio can be controlled at the bottom of the Voice Brief homepage. I was generally impressed with Voice Brief’s reading ability, especially when it came to things like Twitter and the weather forecast. The RSS news feeds only give you a headline and short summary -- I’d like the ability to hear the whole article, although that doesn’t seem to be an option. I do like that you can skip between headlines or tweets without leaving that category altogether.
I think Voice Brief is especially useful for those with a long commute -- how cool is it to listen to the news, weather, and stocks before you even get to work? You may be able to get some of this information on the radio, but the radio won’t get you caught up on your Twitter or Facebook feeds.
The Bottom Line
I’m impressed with Voice Brief overall, especially for its social networking component. I still think that there are apps that are better for news coverage (like NPR News, for example). However, Voice Brief is a pretty cool way to catch up on your Twitter followers or check in on your stocks. Overall rating: 4 stars out of 5.
What You’ll Need
The Voice Brief app is compatible with the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. It requires iPhone OS 4.0 or later.