Apps that read you the news are all the rage right now. Well, at least a few of them are raging hard in the App Store. Just a few days ago, we reviewed Uttr, which reads you the headlines of your favorite RSS feeds.
Umano is another news related app that reads to you. This one features real-life narrators. Sorry Siri, there’s a new voice in town…
If you are about to hop in the car and head to work, but you have not had a chance to read the news, this app makes it possible for you to get interesting articles while driving, jogging, or anything else that might keep your eyes from focusing on your iPhone.
Instead of sending an RSS feed to the app and letting Siri do the talking, this app features articles that are read by real people. Voice actors, journalists, radio personalities, and more, all contribute to the ever-expanding list of daily news articles, editorials, and blogs that fill the virtual pages of Umano.
Interested in tech news? Have TechCrunch’s piece on prestige read to you by the app creator’s co-founder. You can select the categories you are interested in, and a news feed will appear with articles from those categories. Choose from business, entertainment, technology, and more. All articles are presented in the order that they were published to Umano (not their original publish date).
When you choose an article, it will begin playing automatically. You can pause, fast forward, and rewind the narration. You can also speed up the reading if you are in a hurry to get through your list.
You can “like” articles, add comments, and read a brief summary of the article’s description by tapping the info icon. You can also go directly to the web link of the article being read.
The main downside to this app is that you don’t get to select what websites and articles you want read to you from the Internet. They have to be narrated first, so there is no way they could have all of the Internet read every millisecond that a new article goes live.
If you want your favorite websites (eh hem… iDownloadBlog.com) to have articles read by the Umano team, go to the company’s website and submit the RSS feed (https://www.idownloadblog.com/feed) under “publishers.”
The app was recently updated to include a subscription-based premium account. For $3.99 per month, users can get breaking headline news instead of articles that are a few hours old, offline listening, reordering of playlists, sleep timer, and more.
Umano is available for free. Download it in the App Store today.