“I wish I could just listen to my news feeds and Twitter updates on the way to work,” one of my colleagues mentioned a few months ago after a long commute. Shortly thereafter, we heard about Waltham-based VoKnow – offering a solution aimed directly at him, allowing you to “listen to the web.”
We have previewed the company briefly before here at BostInno, as they presented at the local New Tech Meetup in February and a month later at Mass Innovation Nights. The company’s free audio news reader solution hit the app store in the last days of March, and today the company is ready to officially announce its presence in Apple’s App Store and the Android Market (you can also listen right from a Web browser).
The app will allow you to create personalized news programs that you can listen to (as opposed to read) from millions of news sources across the web. The company’s text-to-speech streaming technology can read content from a webpage, news site, blog, and even Twitter so long as you’re connected to the internet or on your phone’s data network.
“VoKnow allows that content to reach more people, audibly, without them having to take time to read,” said VoKnow founder and CEO, Frank Qiu. “All they have to do is create a list of twitter accounts, blogs or news sites to follow and email the link to customers. VoKnow will read them news from those sources with just a click.”
The company is marketing this brilliant app built in Boston for busy people (being perfect for commutes, at work, cooking, relaxing, and exercising) and marketing folks (those looking to turn current marketing into audio programming).
The app is simple to use, prompting you to follow topics and news sources, creating your “audio magazine” with the latest real-time content from these sources. When I signed up conveniently from right within the app, five news sources were already pre-followed across the gamut of main news categories: CNN, The Onion, Sports Illustrated, Techcrunch and the NYTimes. The app allows you to fast forward through articles and quickly move from one to the next most recent one with the flick of a finger.
Tapping “Favorites” from the main Playlist screen and then editing the pre-loaded feeds allowed me to remove and add new ones from a directory of topics from News and Local to Food & Wine — with one topic, of course, being Twitter.
After authenticating with my Twitter account, a “Twitter Home Account” was added to my Favorites list. When clicking back to the home playlist to have tweets read, however, my 1500 followers’ tweets with links completely took over my personalized feed. For those of you like me following a bajillion people, be thankful then that there is also option to only add individual Twitter users. The best part about the Tweets read: VoKnow doesn’t just read the Tweet to you, it goes behind the link to read the article in full.
Aside from potentially getting annoyed by the automated voices, I’m loving where the VoKnow app is going, and look forward to using it and watching them develop!
