Why You Should Try the Read Aloud Feature in Pocket
Pocket , the leading app for saving articles for later reading, has a new voice – Amazon Polly. And it’s good enough that you really want to use it. Not for fiction, poetry, or anything related to tone. But Polly is natural enough that you can forget for a couple of sentences that you are listening to a robot. This is enough to make most articles and even some personal essays acceptable for text-to-speech.
Polly is much better than Instapaper’s voice and better than VoiceOver in iOS (currently the only text-to-speech option in the Kindle app for iOS). Instapaper’s voice sounds like a vintage robot that’s too distracting for even the driest of lyrics. VoiceOver is more like a person, but like a person still learning to read. Listening to both, I could not pay attention to the material itself.
At first I couldn’t pay attention to Polly either, but as soon as I let her fade into the background – as if you were listening on errands – something flipped in my head and I could focus on what she was saying, not her voice. She still stumbles over pronunciation and, like any modern speech robot, cannot tell that some sentences should be read differently than others. But she doesn’t annoy me like other speech robots.
One final caveat: I don’t know why, but Pocket’s text-to-speech isn’t recognizing some articles. But even with this limitation, he is still better than everyone else.
I will not strongly recommend that you let the bot read the articles for you. Personally, I think you should find some podcasts and keep your reading for actual reading. Give speech robots a few more years to improve. But if you really enjoy text-to-speech – or, of course, if visual reading isn’t right for you – then you should choose Polly.
Pocket clicks on Amazon Polly so you can listen to articles like podcasts | VentureBeat