The Wall Street Journal has offered an Android app since last year. But the app was only available for Android tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Now the WSJ has finally released an Android app for smartphones. Wall Street Journal Mobile is available as a free download from the Android Market.

The app shows top stories from the newspaper divided by section, includes a “Photos of the Day” feature, and lets you access video and podcast content. You can save articles to read later and share items via email, Facebook, and Twitter.

One feature I’d love to see in more news apps is a “listen to article” text to speech article. The digital voice is horribly annoying, but at least it seems to do a decent job with punctuation, and if you want to catch up on the latest news while you’re driving, walking, or otherwise unable to read, text to speech is a killer feature.

While some articles are available when you register for a free account, you’ll need to be a Wall Street Journal subscriber to view premium content. You don’t really get to do anything with the mobile app unless you at least register.

via Android Police

BuzzVoice is a mobile app for iOS and Android that basically reads the news to you out loud. It uses text to speech technology to read the stories out loud to you.

Honestly, like most speech to text apps, the digital voices are kind of annoying, but at least the phrasing and pacing is pretty good. And if you’re in the car or in another location where you want to hear the news but can’t stop to read it, BuzzVoice could come in handy. It could also be very useful for sight impaired smartphone users.

The app has about 1600 news sites and blogs in its directory, allowing you to find news by searching. You can also add any site to your personal playlist as long as it has an RSS feed.

There are also a list of BuzzVoice “radio” stations which let you listen to the top stories in a number of categories, including Android, Apple, Celebrities, Politics, Sports, or Tech.

This week BuzzVoice launched updated versions of its mobile apps, and they’re now available as free, ad-supported downloads for iOS and Android. The new iPhone app also supports background audio streaming and a feature that lets you control playback with the buttons on your headset.

You can check out a demo video after the break.

via Android Community

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Ever wish you could hit the snooze button on an alarm without putting on your glasses, looking for your clock or phone and pressing a button? WakeVoice is a new Android app that makes it almost too easy to hit stop or snooze, since you’ll be able to stop your alarm by talking to it.

The app uses speech to text and text to speech. In other words, not only can you say ‘stop” to turn off an alarm, but you can also program the app to speak to you when the alarm goes off. Instead of listening to an annoying ringing sound, you can listen to an annoying computerized voice telling you the latest news, weather forecast, or a custom message.

The developer plans to add the ability to wake up to an MP3 playlist, radio, or other sounds.

WakeVoice isn’t available in the Android Market yet, but it should be coming soon. It will be available in two versions. The full version will run 1.49€ (about $1.96), while WakeVoice Lite will offer all the features — but you’ll have a limited number of uses.

via xda-developers

Google Android has built-in speech recognition, which means you can translate speech to text in many apps. But Edwin is one of the few that will talk back. For instance, you can ask Edwin the time, and it will tell you. Ask it for tomorrow’s forecast and a computerized voice will read it to you. You can even ask it to translate words or sentences from one language to another or to define or spell words for you.

Edwin also works as an app launcher and controller for your phone’s hardware. For instance, you can tell it to put your phone in airplane mode or turn the Bluetooth on or off. Or you can tell it to open the camera application.

Like most speech recognition apps, Edwin isn’t perfect. Or maybe it’s just my voice that isn’t perfect. Sometimes it misunderstands commands, and while you’re supposed to be able to open applications by saying “launch X” or “open X,” I’ve found that it works a lot better with “open.” But overall, it’s a pretty nifty little application, and best of all it’s available as a free download.

After the break is a video showing how Edwin responds when I ask it for the time, temperature, nearest movie theater, and other information.

via Gizmodo

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