NewsAloud Review

I own a Macbook Air and run the parallel systems for Microsoft windows therefore most programs which run on Microsoft are difficult to download, however NewsAloud downloaded within seconds and I was excited to finally experience a software that would work within half an hour.

The setting preferences popped up and I was immediately shown a simple interface, not too modern, with large font text. Clicking next I was faced with a range of options for articles; such as 'business', 'crime', 'science' etc. Although I noticed that all the resources stemmed from 'Yahoo' and 'Reuters'; so even though there seems to be a large selection of different topics for articles, you are not provided with a range of resources for which to compare articles (something I usually prefer to do so as to get all sides of a story).

After choosing two topics, 'entertainment' and 'odd news' I was faced with the choice of checking for 'new files'. Of course, choosing yes, I proceeded to wait...and wait...and wait, until eventually the program refused to respond and closed down.

At this point half an hour had gone by and I was not even at the point of listening to any news article.

I tried once more and after waiting ten minutes for an update, I was sorely disappointed with an empty page. After waiting for all that time, and told that articles were downloading, I had nothing.

After reading the quick start guide, I was still no further in achieving any progress and the program once again refused to respond.

After an hour of trying, I eventually managed to download a few articles from one topic, 'entertainment', and finally got down to listening to my chosen article.

After five seconds of listening to the article, I wanted to throw my laptop across the room in order to stop the noise emanating from my speakers. The robotic voice reading the article is not only monotonous but has a strange intonation which makes it difficult to understand what the thing is saying. It took me a while to process where a word would start let alone where the sentence would end. The voice was continuous and my chosen article became easier to read than to listen to.