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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Tech Review Gives Voice to iPhone AppsFriday, April 8, 2011  Not surprisingly, the MIT-owned Technology Review stays ahead of the curve when it comes to smartphone apps. Its iPhone version of the Technology Review magazine and site is a handy and generally workmanlike mobilization of the site and print content. But then the TR crew tosses in an unexpected and rare feature – voice narration.The underlying app is neatly designed with a combination of top line carousel menu selections for topics: Computing, Web, Communications, Energy, Energy, Materials, Biomedicine and Business. Bottom line menu tabs silo the content by types: Headlines, Blogs, Video and Playlist (more on that later). The design is compact and elegant, including the tools for sharing and commenting, which remain on a bottom button bar that frames the article no matter where your are in the lengthy scroll. TR has not done any editing of its often lengthy articles for mobile consumption, so be ready for a long haul in some places. While the sharing tools are well done, we wonder why a magazine that serves as a reference work for so many readers doesn’t have an article save function. But we were pleased to see a comment tool that lets the user post comments directly from the app. Registration is required, but the app lets you go through that data entry piece from the app itself. The one novel feature in TR's app is voice. Using text-to-voice synthesis, any article can be read to the user. A simple Listen button activates the feature, and all of the major stories are accessible for easy playback in the Playlist area. While the reading function is innovative and conceivably useful, the feature lacks the necessary bookmarking and restarting conventions of audio narration. An audio playback cannot keep one's place. And we are not entirely sure how useful a Playlist is per se if the user cannot customize the article list by editing and reordering the track. Again, there is a promise of functionality here that is not actually delivered as one would expect. Overall, Technology Review gets points for trying something new, although we think the technology here is more of a tease than a real tool that can be easily used. Listening to the stories in a lean-back or hands-free environment really requires more basic audio playback tools and track management. The synthesized voice is quite good, however, which only makes us wish the feature had been developed more fully.  If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com
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Posted by MG on Tuesday, June 28, 2011 @ 10:08 AM
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