Berkeley, California – Imaja is proud to announce the release of Speak News 1.0, a new RSS news reader with text-to-speech, supporting Siri activation, available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Speak News delivers streamlined RSS news feeds, with flexible Settings for text-to-speech, earphone remote control support, and more.

Main Features:
Use Siri to open Speak News and listen to news stories hands-free using the earphones remote control. Just say “Hey Siri, Open Speak News” and the app will start reading your current news stories.

Use the remote control on earphones to speak and pause stories, move to next or previous stories, or select a new RSS feed from your bookmarks.

All stories are saved on your device for later offline reading and listening. Efficient text-only story display makes loading and reading faster, and saves money on your cell phone plan by downloading minimal data.

Toolbar functions in the feed view include Play/Pause, Stop, Previous, Next, Update, View Mode, Share, Settings. Current story info and Play/Pause, Previous, Next functions are also available in the media player controls in the device’s lock screen and Control Center.

Share news headlines and links, or entire news feeds through the standard iOS Share social media activities view, including Message, Mail, Notes, Reminders, Twitter, Google+, OneNote, Wunderlist, Flipboard, Facebook, Pinterest, Evernote, etc.

Speak News automatically rotates through available voices for the current language for each story. This gives more variety and distinction in the sequence of spoken news stories. For instance, in English, this gives U.S., U.K. Ireland, New Zealand, and Australian voices.

Toolbar functions in the Bookmarks view include New Bookmark, Go To Section, Find, Update, Settings, App Info, Feed and Edit.

Speak News provides a Today widget to display a convenient scrolling list of stories from the current news feed. Configure the Today widget in Speak News > Settings. Tap a story to open the story in Speak News.

Create your own bookmarks and bookmark sections. Import bookmarks from the Speak News RSS Feeds Library featuring a broad selection of essential and informative news feeds.

Several touch gesture shortcuts support feed view navigation, speech control, changing display styles or story length, and updating all feeds.

Settings includes many controls for news story display, auto-reload, speech and auto-scrolling behavior, and user-interface sounds.

Keyboard shortcuts are supported for Speak News navigation and speech functions when using an external Bluetooth keyboard.

Display Styles include White, Light Gray, Sepia, Dark Gray, Dark Red, and Black. The “dark mode” Black and Dark Red styles are ideal for reading in dark environments. All text is responsive to the user’s preferred text size as set in Settings > Display & Brightness > Text Size, and Settings > General > Accessibility > Larger Text.

RSS feed details are viewable in the Edit Bookmark view. Word Usage action displays statistics on word frequencies in a story or a complete feed.

Imaja’s Greg Jalbert points out the innovative new features, “Imaja created Speak News to expedite news research and sharing, and leverages Siri activiation, flexible text-to-speech controls, and earphone remote control. Speak News helps users keep up with news hands-free with speech, and also provides tight readable views with auto-scrolling and a great set of touch gesture shortcuts and keyboard shortcuts. A full range of Settings lets users determine the desired behavior of Speak News text-to-speech, audio mixing, feed updating, display styles, and more.”

Device Requirements
* iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch
* Requires iOS 8.0 or later
* 19.4 MB

Pricing and Availability:
Speak News 1.0 is available for the introductory price of $4.99 (USD), available worldwide exclusively from Apple’s iOS App Store in the Business and Productivity categories. Visit Imaja online for complete details.

Imaja
Speak News 1.0
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Located in Berkeley, California, USA, Imaja was founded in 1985 by Greg Jalbert. The company develops and publishes a variety of productivity, business, graphic design, animation, music and educational software for Mac OS X, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch.. All Material and Software (C) 1985-2016 Imaja / All Rights Reserved. Apple, Mac OS X, iPhone, iPad, iPod and Macintosh are registered trademarks of Apple Computer in the U.S. and/or other countries.