Thursday, October 01, 2009

Your Feeds "Talks" To You, If They Are On Android

Yes there is an App for that, certainly on Android based phones. So Android users now can listen to their news out loud while your hands are busy to handle phone.
Or just take the case of the author of the article and the app, Stephane Doyon,that I have pointed at the bottom, who is blind.

The Talking RSS Reader does the task via text-to-speech library adapted from android eyes-free project, helping mobile phoning for visually impaired. Sometimes I am amazed at what a mind could do to solve simple tasks ans this is one of them! Here are some facts about the App from the project page.

It begins reading each article out loud as soon as it is displayed. The sentence currently being spoken is colored in green.
Speech can be interrupted and restarted by pressing the CALL button.
To move to the previous or next sentence, spin the trackball up or down while the app is talking.
If the text is scrolled, speech will pick up at the first full sentence from the top of the screen.
Links can be selected with the finger, or trackball when the app is not talking. Clicking a link launches the browser, which does not talk.
You can have sentences spoken one at a time by holding the CALL button and spinning the trackball up or down.
The Next and Prev article buttons are located at the bottom corners of the screen, where they can easily be tapped without looking. Each article is marked as read after you click Next.
If you are a first time user of Google Reader, you may need to initialize your account by going to http://google.com/reader.


Google Open Source Blog: Talking RSS Reader for Android

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