In this first post, I want to talk about an iPhone app called voicebrief. This App has very similar concept of Lisgo, and I can tell there are many people who want to listen to the web contents from the success of this App.

Table of contents

*RSS function of voicebrief
*Voice quality

RSS function of voicebrief

I like reading books and web content so I always wanted an iPhone app to listen to them on the go, but there was not a good one for that before.

At March this year, I decided to make the App by myself, and started learning iPhone development. Just at the time, Voice Brief got released on App Store and I tried it right away.

It looks quite nice tool if you want to listen to the feeds of facebook, twitter, e-mail, RSS feeds. However, I just want to listen to the RSS feeds so I tried the RSS function only.

I believe voiceBrief is the best text to speech app on App Store now if you want to listen to your RSS feeds. But, there are several problems which is quite difficult to solve for developers.

If blog owners did not allow RSS to feed full contents, voice brief can’t load all of them. There are a quite few blogs do not show their full content on RSS, so it is quite difficult problem.

I plan to implement RSS function to Lisgo, and I need to solve this problem.

Other than that, you can’t read RSS content like other popular RSS reader apps, so you can’t switch from listening to reading in this App yet.

Voice quality

Speaking of the voice engine, it uses the same voice engine of Lisgo, which is acapela text to speech. Acapela voice engine is quite good, you can check the quality here.

VoiceBrief covers English only now, but there are other European languages available on Acapela text to speech engine, so we might be able to use voicebrief with another languages.

Unfortunately, there are no Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean on Acapela speech now. I contacted them about it, and they said they would talk about implementing these languages end of this year.