Friends Aloud

Description of App

Friends Aloud Pro is a personalized “News Radio” that broadcasts your friends’ news directly to you, then lets you dictate your responses, including comments and likes via automated speech recognition from Nuance. With Friends Aloud Pro, you can stay connected with your friends anytime, anywhere. Using state of the art text-to-speech and speech-to-text technology, you can listen hands-free to everything your friends post in a soothing voice and then speak your replies, all while you’re driving, walking, working out, or just relaxing.

MacWorld said about the original Friends Aloud, "Facebook has been striving to be all things to all people: an e-mail service, a newspaper, even a place to share videos. But it hasn't been a radio station—until now."

Wall Street Journal said, "If you need to be abreast of the updates that continually bombard your Facebook account, a new iPhone application has been released called Friends Aloud which might help you stay on top of all those updates, by reading the your Facebook updates out loud to you."

Appolicious said, "If keeping up with your Facebook news feed is so important to you that you do dumb things like read it while driving, Friends Aloud Lite can make your life safer while making sure you don't miss a status."

Friends Aloud Pro features:

• Read aloud your latest Facebook news feed posts and their associated comments in a pleasant, easy-to-understand young woman’s voice
• Dictate status updates, comments, and "like" your friends' posts with Nuance-powered automatic speech recognition, complete with punctuation
• Display each post on the screen, so that you can tap around to read posts at random
• Automatically shift to reading only new posts for as long as you leave the app running
• Intuitive play, pause, and skip forward/back buttons, just like the iPod
• Continue reading aloud while in the background, just like the iPod
• Understand and read some common computer jargon such as smiley faces, texting-style abbreviations (LOL, ROTFLMAO, etc.)
• Mute posts from friends or “liked pages” that you prefer to skip
• Use standard Facebook login to connect with your friends
• Number of comments read can be limited to none, the latest 5, 10, 20, or a maximum of 50
• Read headlines of links, photo albums, and videos
• Read as far back in time as you wish by tapping “Older posts”

Why use Friends Aloud?

• Listen to your friends’ postings and dicate your responses while driving, walking, in a meeting, at work, anywhere your eyes are otherwise occupied
• Keep your eyes on the road so that you don’t get pulled over for “texting while driving” or – worse – cause an accident
• Relax your eyes by listening to, instead of reading, your friends’ news

What's New in Version 3.0

Friends Aloud 3.0 now includes Nuance-based speech recognition that enables you to dictate status updates, comments, and "likes." It both reads aloud and listens to your spoken responses, enabling a complete, end-to-end, Facebook-by-voice experience.

Just tap the mic button on the main screen, say anything you like, and it will convert what you said to text and auto-send it to Facebook. Start with "Comment..." to make it a comment, or just say "Like" to like the current post. Or speak again to edit or add more to what you said before. Dictate punctuation as necessary: to post "I think, therefore I am!" you would simply say, "I think comma therefore I am exclamation point."

In the Settings screen, choose between an American or UK English accent, and turn on/off Auto-Send. After that, it just works.

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