Updated: 18th Sept, 2017
Can you hear it?
Listening is by far the easiest way for us to consume content; if there are no other distractions.
I’ve been using several methods to listen to content for some time now and my consumption of content is off the charts!
For a while there Sound Gecko was THE GO TO APP for text-to-speech. But the guys and gals behind Sound Gecko decided to change direction on another app and Sound Gecko was no more.
RIP Sound Gecko.
You served us up content from loads of great sources. We could add our own and consume content by listening to it via your robotic voice. It didn’t matter. We mashed your technology into our clients’ websites and email marketing creating new levels of consuming content experiences.
Your app was the holy grail and by far was my most favourite app of all time. Until another technology comes along that wraps it all together into a nice little package; we make do. We will search high and low for new experiences and tools.
What Sound Gecko did really well out of the box was have the content fed directly into the interface. Have it converted with the mp3 uploaded to your Dropbox by default to listen to by other means if necessary.
Lisgo
Enter Lisgo. A listening App that only works with Pocket
Automating your consumption with Pocket
What other apps can deliver you content that you can review etc?
There are loads of them but in this article I am going to focus on Pocket. Pocket allows you to add items to read for later via a little ‘bookmarlet’ you add to your browser to select when you see something of interest; it adds it to your personal magazine of sorts.
The Pocket user interface is a joy to use both on computer screens and mobile devices. Get Pocket.
So how can I listen to my content?
Enter Lisgo. A listening App that only works with Pocket. Install and login with your Pocket credentials.
I really like Lisgo so far. It’s free and it has an Australian accent. There is an upgrade for around A$11.00 which unlocks extra listening time and other features.
At this stage Lisgo is only available on the Apple App store.
Pocket released an update July 16, 2015 that now offers Text-to-Speech out of the box).
It includes cool features to control the speed of speech. It is a computer-generated voice, but pretty good. You get used to it. The feature is it can skip paragraphs like skipping tracks on your music. Nice one Pocket.
Such a feature is a natural progression for Pocket. For all those companies like Lisgo and Audiofy that integrate with Pocket I would imagine would be just a little annoyed right now. However it’s not the end of the road for them if they can integrate with other content collection tools like Evernote, Flipboard and more – then they will have a more universally appealing offer.
Though I still prefer to use Lisgo especially when I am driving. It works like a playlist and just continues onto the next article which is great whilst driving. With Pocket you manually have to skip to the next article which is not idea when driving.
More ways to consume your content
From the same developer Umemoto Non he’s developed Voice Paper which can import content from Dropbox and Evernote or even paste in some copy. Nice!
For those using iOS11, there is a new version for Lisgo users called Voice Paper 2. Since Voice Paper will not work on iOs11 powered devices.
