Update History

Speak News

Read and listen to RSS news feeds with the Speak News app for iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

Version 2.24.9

Fixed bug and potential crash issue when opening the Voice Library Configuration view from the Settings view when in the News view.

Version 2.24.8

The Speak News news feed and web page text and text-to-speech reader app for iPhone and iPad gets improvements and bug fixes.

Refined some user interface style elements and fixed a few minor style glitches.
Fixed crash when opening the Siri Shortcuts view.

Version 2.24.7

The Speak News news feed and web page text-to-speech reader app is updated with numerous user interface and aesthetic improvements and modernizations for the bookmarks and popover views. This update refines various graphics Display style options available in the Settings view. Tap the gear button in the toolbar to open the Settings view. Customize the visual environment for readability in different lighting situations.

Version 2.24.4

Speak News gets a bug fix:

The Done button now correctly appears in the New Bookmark and Edit Bookmark popover views on iPad.

Version 2.24.3

Fixed a bug in loading the bookmark collection from iCloud.

Version 2.24.2

Speak News gets a couple improvements:

A vibrant new icon design that works better for dark mode on the iPhone and iPad, for those late night readers out there!
Minor text-to-speech pronunciation improvements for common news phrases.

Version 2.24.1

Speak News gets some nice interface improvements.

Several action views are now displayed as popovers instead of sheets: Update Feeds, Add New Bookmark, Go to Section, Move Selected Bookmarks, Choose Section, Settings, and Speak News App Info, particularly in landscape orientation on the iPhone or iPod touch.
The popovers improve the experience by helping keep the context of the underlying view visible, including in landscape orientation.
Improved background color consistency for popover views.
Improved interface colors for the Edit Bookmark view in the app-based dark appearance.
Fixed glitches with Done buttons.

Version 2.23.1

Minor text-to-speech pronunciation improvements.

Version 2.23.0

Speak News gets a useful new feature and a bug fix:

New option in Speak News app Settings view: "Maximum items per feed".

This determines how many items to save in the app's cache for each RSS feed. Previously, this was a fixed internal value of 80. Small numbers (30 items for example) will allow the app to operate faster, while larger numbers (80+) provide more news items in the app's cache for later viewing offline, also helpful if one wishes to keep track of older stories. The number of items in the cache can be larger than the number of items provided in a given reload of a feed, hence giving one access to older stories no longer in the active feed.

Bug fix to improve the behavior of the "Hide toolbars when speaking" option in Settings.

Version 2.22.0

Speak News enhances the presentation of news and web page text to minimize distractions while reading:

"Hide toolsbars when speaking" is a new option in the Speech Behavior section of the Settings view. When this option is on, the navigation bar at the top and the toolbar at the bottom will automatically hide when using the Speak action, or when two-finger tapping an article to start text-to-speech, and when choosing the Smooth Scroll action in the Share activities view.

Single finger tap to stop the text-to-speech or smooth scroll action and make the navigation bar and toolbar visible again.
The toolbars will also reappear when one swipes right from the left edge of the News view to return to the Bookmarks view.
Speak News supports both modern and older devices, devices running iOS 9.3 through iOS 16 or later.

Version 2.21.0

Speak News gets improvements and bug fixes for the Today widget:

Better text font and layout for compact news display.
Fixed glitches in widget update behavior.
Speak News supports both modern and older devices, devices running iOS 9.3 through iOS 16 or later.

Version 2.20.2

Speak News gets improvements and bug fixes:

Fixed a bug in the Edit Bookmark view; the Clear (x) buttons were inadvertently missing in the last update.
Improved news feed and article page parsing and formatting, removing extraneous non-story items.
Minor improvements for text-to-speech.

Version 2.20.1

Speak News gets improvements and bug fixes:

All new design for the Edit Bookmark view, easier to use and understand.
Improved the presentation of the Edit Bookmark view for iPad.
Minor bug fixes.

Version 2.19.7

Improved news feed and article page parsing and formatting, removing extraneous non-story items.

Version 2.19.6

Speak News gets improvements and bug fixes:

Improved news article page parsing, cleaning up extraneous text items.
Corrected some pronunciations in news text.

Version 2.19.5

Speak News gets improvements and a couple bug fixes:

Improved news article page parsing.
Fixed a bug for opening a "custom URL" into Speak News when the app was already running in the background.

Note: One way to add a bookmark to Speak News for an RSS feed or a web page is to use a custom URL. A custom URL for Speak News is just like a URL except the "https" at the beginning is replaced with "speaknews". For example: speaknews://www.imaja.com/speaknews/features.xml . If a "speaknews:" link is located in a text file, message or email, and the Speak News app is installed on that device, the link will be clickable and will open into Speak News and add that URL as a bookmark.

Fixed a bug in the Speak button for items in the Speak News Today Widget.

Version 2.19.4

Improved news article page parsing.

Version 2.19.3

Bug fixes for redundant news source names and headlines that appear in some news feeds.

Version 2.19.2

Speak News gets text-to-speech improvements and other bug fixes:

Speak News gets numerous improvements in text-to-speech for listening to news sources.
Removed redundant news source names that appear in some news feeds.
Improved punctuation of news items for onscreen readability.
Fixed a bug in the collection of news feed item categories.

Version 2.19.1

Speak News gets a bookmark collection management feature and bug fixes:

Added a way to delete multiple bookmarks at once, much faster.
To delete multiple bookmarks at once
Tap the folder icon in the top right toolbar of the Bookmarks view.
The Bookmark view will shift into selection mode, with selection indicator circles to the left of each bookmark, and three action buttons in the top right toolbar: Move to Section (the folder icon), Delete (the trash can icon), and Done.
Tap the desired bookmarks to add them to the selection, and the circles will indicate the selected bookmarks with a blue checkmark.
Once the desired bookmarks are selected, tap the folder button, the trash button, or Done.
The selected bookmarks will be deleted from the bookmarks collection.
Fixed a bug in the text-to-speech for currency amounts in certain situations.

Version 2.18.3

Speak News gets a few text-to-speech improvements and bug fixes.

Version 2.18.2

Speak News gets a new "Clean up cache" action, freeing up storage space on your device by removing obsolete news feed cache files.

To do the "Clean up cache" action, open the Speak News App Info view by tapping the question mark (?) button in the Bookmarks view.
Choose "Clean up cache". A bell tone will sound when the cache cleanup is completed. It takes a while, and only runs in the background while Speak News is the active app.
The "Clean up cache" action takes place in the background without taking up too much processing power. For example, on a device with about 2000 bookmarks in Speak News, the Clean up cache action could take about 10 minutes, depending on the state of the cache. Check the Speak News App Info view to see the cache size get reduced over time.

Version 2.18.1

Improvements and a bug fix for Home screen quick actions behavior.

Version 2.18.0

Speak News gets new Home screen quick actions:

Touch and hold the Speak News app icon on the Home screen to display the quick actions menu.
The quick actions include: New Bookmark with Clipboard, Update While Reading, Pause Speech, and Start Speech.
To use the New Bookmark With Clipboard action, copy a URL for an RSS feed or web page to the Clipboard, then choose the quick action from the Speak News app icon on the Home screen.
Note: Home screen quick actions are available on iOS 13.0 or later.
Speak News supports both modern and older devices, devices running iOS 9.3 through iOS 15 or later.

Version 2.17.10

Speak News gets a few bug fixes:

Fixed the chaotic scrolling bug in the Bookmarks view during automatic bookmark updating.
Fixed a launch bug that occured in certain situations.
Fixed a launch bug that could occur in rare situations in the restoration of local bookmarks.

Version 2.17.7

Speak News gets text-to-speech improvements:

Various extraneous text phrases and duplicate text phrases are removed from news and other web pages for a better text-to-speech experience.

Version 2.17.6

Speak News gets text-to-speech improvements:

Improvements in text-to-speech for the names of various news sources, and the pronunciation of abbreviations, measurements and units.

Version 2.17.5

Speak News gets optimized for older iPads and iPhones:

Improved news processing performance and a bug fix for older iOS 9 systems. Older devices are more useful when the apps are actively supported for those environments, so we strive to keep those older (and still amazing!) machines working for everyone.

Speak News optimizes your news reading productivity by focusing on the text readabiity, highly customizable text-to-speech, autoscrolling, on-device caching of news for offline reading, iCloud bookmark library syncing, and much more.

Version 2.17.4

Removed support for Twitter; a change in their web technology prevents access to reading Twitter items in the Speak News app.
Bug fixes.

Version 2.17.3

Speak News gets text-to-speech improvements for phrasing and acronyms, and a few bug fixes.

Tweets are now linked to open when tapped. They can also be dragged to another app.
Improved error handling for opening a bookmark with an OPML / XML link.

Version 2.17.2

Minor text-to-speech improvements and bug fixes.

Version 2.17.1

Speak News gets text-to-speech improvements:

Minor improvements for text-to-speech, improved pronunciation of units, measurements, and abbreviations.
Text-to-speech now pronounces geographic coordinates such as 51°28′38″N.

For details on new enhanced support for Siri Shortcuts and other new features, see the info for Speak News 2.17.0.

Version 2.17.0

Speak News gets new enhanced support for Siri Shortcuts and other new features!

The following activities in Speak News are now available as Siri Shortcuts, so they can be triggered with your voice.

Speak News Siri Shortcuts:

Control text-to-speech
- Start Speak News
- Pause Speak News
- Resume Speak News
- Stop Speak News
- Speak section
- Speak bookmark
- Speak current view
Changing the view
- Show headlines view
- Show short view
- Show medium view
- Show full view
Navigate the bookmarks and stories
- Smooth scroll Speak News
- Go to next bookmark
- Go to previous bookmark
- Go to next story
- Go to previous story
Updating/adding bookmarks, and Settings
- Update while reading
- Fast background update
- Add from Feed Library
- Add bookmark manually
- Show Settings

After performing one of these activities in Speak News, the activity will appear in Settings > Siri & Search > Speak News > Shortcuts and in the Shortcuts app for use in creating one’s custom shortcuts. A custom speech phrase may be recorded to trigger the Shortcut.

Siri Shortcuts may also be configured in the Siri Shortcuts view in Speak News. Choose Configure Siri Shortcuts in the Speak News Settings view to see the complete set of available Siri Shortcuts. Tap the plus (+) button to add and configure a particular shortcut. To configure a shortcut that has already been added, tap the gear button.

Tutorial with screenshots: How to use Siri Shortcuts for Speak News for iPhone and iPad

https://imaja.com/speaknews/How-to-use-Siri-Shortcuts-for-Speak-News.html

New actions in the menu for a given text selection have been added. Select the desired text in the News view and choose one of the following actions from the popup menu. For example, if the selected text is "BluesMan", the action will create a new bookmark with the chosen action:

Wikipedia — the Wikipedia page for BluesMan
Google news — a Google news topic search for BluesMan
Twitter — a Twitter search for BluesMan
Tweets — tweets from @BluesMan.

Also the "Bookmark search" action in the menu will open the Bookmarks view and start a search for BluesMan.

We've updated the news feed update process to handle changes in some of the source protocols. This is a background update and does not change the features or user interface.
Speak News also gets some minor text-to-speech bug fixes and improvements.

Version 2.16.2

Speak News gets a bug fix:

Bookmark deletion is now working properly. When "Use iCloud for Settings" is turned on in Settings, Speak News bookmark deletions and additions on one device will automatically be reflected in Speak News on one's other devices connected to the same iCloud account. It takes several seconds for an update on one device to be transferred through iCloud to other devices.

Version 2.16.1

Speak News gets some bug fixes and improvements:

The "story contains (phrase)" query type of bookmark is now working properly again.
Bookmark item counts and data sizes are now properly restored when the app is relaunched.
Minor text-to-speech improvements.

Version 2.16.0

Speak News gets a cool new story caching feature, text-to-speech improvements, and a bug fix.

RSS and Atom news feed items and tweets will now accumulate in the bookmark. For example, even if a news feed only delivers 20 items in an update, the bookmark will add any new items to existing items from previous updates, saving up to eighty (80) items on the device for offline reading!
The "Speak items only once" option in Settings is working better now with a bug fix. The app now properlly restores the 'spoken' status of the items upon updating a feed/bookmark. The 'spoken' status of an item is indicated by an empty circle (not spoken) or a full circle (spoken) after the item title when the "Speak items only once" option is turned on.
Improved text-to-speech.

Version 2.15.3

Speak News gets bug fixes:

Fixed glitches in order of speaking news items for the two-finger tap action and when changing the View Mode while speaking news items.
To start speaking a specific news item in a News view, tap with two-fingers on the item.

Version 2.15.2

Speak News gets a bug fix and mini-tutorial on query bookmarks:

Fixed problems with the 'all stories in section' and 'all stories' query-type bookmarks.

How to use Speak News query bookmarks:

Use the phrase 'all stories in section' or 'all stories' as the title of a bookmark to create a Speak News query bookmark.
When other bookmarks in the collection or in a given section are updated from the Internet news feed, the stories from the newly updated bookmark will be added to the appropriate query bookmarks. Older stories are purged from a query bookmark to make room for newer stories.
To change the maximum number of stories that can be saved in a query bookmark, open the Settings view (the gear icon button) and change the 'Maximum items in queries' in the Miscellaneous section.

Version 2.15.1

Minor improvements to Speak News:

Fixed a bug where some news feeds were not sorted in newest first order.
Minor text-to-speech improvement for abbreviations.

Version 2.15.0

Speak News gets improved bookmark collection management:

A new Move Bookmarks To Section action has been added (the folder icon button in the Bookmarks view toolbar).
To enter the Move Bookmarks mode, tap the folder icon button in the Bookmarks view. The Bookmarks view displays empty circles beside each bookmark, and the toolbar displays a Move Bookmarks To Section button (folder icon).
To select bookmarks to be moved, tap the desired bookmarks and the empty circles will change to blue checkmark icons.
Then tap the Move Bookmarks To Section button (folder icon). The Move Bookmarks action will display the Move Selected Bookmarks To Section view for choosing the destination section (folder).
To simply exit the Edit mode without moving bookmarks, tap Done.
The new Move Bookmarks To Section action makes it much easier to manage large bookmark collections organized in sections.

Version 2.14.2

Speak News gets improvements, optimization, and bug fixes:

Improved bookmark collection syncing for iCloud and fixed a bug where bookmark collection order could possibly get jumbled.
Optimized app startup for faster access, particularly for a large bookmark collection.
Corrected the title text color for various views in dark mode.

Version 2.14.1

Fixed bugs in the display of items in the Speak News Today widget.

Version 2.14.0

Speak News now supports iCloud for bookmark syncing! New features:

iCloud supports the syncing of one's Speak News bookmark collection to other iOS devices: iPad, iPhone or iPad touch.
New option in the Speak News Settings view: Use iCloud for Settings. To allow Speak News to use iCloud, turn this option on.
Upon app startup, the Speak News Settings will be restored from the local copy of Settings and then merged with the iCloud copy of Settings.
Upon app exit, the Settings will be stored both locally on the device and to iCloud if the device is connected to the Internet and one's iCloud account is logged in.
Use the iOS Settings app to configure iCloud.
Additional Text-to-speech improvements.

Version 2.13.3

Corrected text color in the Speak News Today widget in Dark appearance on iOS 13.

Version 2.13.2

Speak News gets a new feature, improvement and bug fix:

Added a Play button (triangle icon) to items displayed in the Speak News Today widget. Tap the play button in the Today widget to listen to the item via text-to-speech in the app.
Improved handling of Custom URLs of the form speaknews://...
Fixed bugs with the View Story and Speak Story activities in the Share view for when one taps a story headline in the News view.

Version 2.13.1

Improvements to Speak News: iOS 13 and Dark Mode support, and bug fixes:

To get the benefits of Dark Mode support in iOS 13, choose the white background Display Style in the Speak News Settings view (the gear icon button in the toolbar). On iOS 13, the "white background" style will automatically follow the light or dark appearance of the system.
In iOS versions before iOS 13, the app appearance can be customized with in-app 'dark mode' by changing the Display Style in the Settings view..
Swiping left or right on a News view will go to the next or previous bookmark. If the News view was speaking, it will finish speaking the current item before continuing speech in the new bookmark in the News view.

Version 2.13.0

Speak News gets new features and bug fixes:

New support for Siri Shortcuts!

The following activities in Speak News are now avaible as Siri Shortcuts, so they can be triggered with your voice!

Speak section (section name)
Speak bookmark (bookmark name)
Update while reading
Fast background update
Add from feed library
Add bookmark manually (or from clipboard)

After performing one of these activities in Speak News, the activity will appear in the Shortcuts app for use in creating one's custom shortcuts.

Tutorial with screenshots: How to use Siri Shortcuts for Speak News for iPhone and iPad

https://imaja.com/speaknews/How-to-use-Siri-Shortcuts-for-Speak-News.html

Bug fixes:

This update corrects a bug in handling a RSS feed or web page loading error.
Fixed bug in behavior of the Next button in the News view. Tap the Next button once to start speaking the next story in the News view. Double-tap the Next button to skip to the next bookmark and start speaking.
The Share button activity behavior has been changed. The AirDrop option was not working for sending formatted text, so the share action for a News view now shares a plain-text version of the view.
To support Siri Shortcuts, this version is built to support iOS 10 or later. Stay tuned for future versions that will be specifically built for compatibility with older versions such as iOS 8 or later.

Version 2.12.9

New feature and bug fixes for Speak News:

New feature: The "Go to section" view now has a "play" button (with the triangle icon) for each section to start text-to-speech with the first bookmark in the section.
Fixed a bug in changes to the Section of a given bookmark in the Edit Bookmark view.
Fixed an incorrect punctuation.
Fixed bug in title of bookmark when there is a loading error.
Added screenshots to App Store for iPad Pro 12.9-inch 3rd generation and iPad Pro 11-inch and updated other screenshots.

Version 2.12.8

Improvements to Speak News:

Improved speech pacing for news article title, author and date.

Version 2.12.7

Improvements and bug fixes to Speak News:

Improved speech pronunciation for more abbreviations and topical phrases.
Bug fix: Improved special character support for Google news bookmarks.
Bug fix: Speech stopping bug that occurred in certain conditions is fixed.

Version 2.12.6

Improvements to Speak News:

Improved the Save Page action: the bookmark title is updated with the HTML page title.
The "Go to section" view will auto-scroll to the top only if it has not been opened in the last minute. This helps keep one's context when switching between sections when one has a lot of sections in the bookmarks collection.
Improved speech for added news topic acronyms and other abbreviations.
Bug fixes.

Version 2.12.5

Interface improvement and bug fix for Speak News:

Interface improvement to the Settings view headers; now the first header pins to the top of the view when scrolling.
Fixed the way the Share button works for HTML web pages and Wikipedia pages: only the title and the URL of the article will be shared.

Version 2.12.4

Speak News Improvements

Further improvements for saving news story web pages.
HTML web pages now display the base web site URL link in the caption below the article title.
Wikipedia page and HTML web page titles now link to the source pages. To open the source web page, tap the title link and choose Open in Safari.

Version 2.12.3

Speak News Improves Saving of News Story Pages

Saving and reading news story web pages gets more streamlined in this update to Speak News:

Improvements to the Save Page action to remove more extraneous non-news phrases and HTML code from story text.
The Save Page action lets one archive the text of web pages of news stories from the News view story links.
To use the Save Page action, tap a story headline in the News view for an RSS feed and choose Save Page in the activities view.
These pages are saved (cached) in the bookmarks listing and can be read later while offline.
The saved web page bookmarks can be organized into sections, for instance an "Articles" section.
Use the Edit button in the Bookmarks view to edit the order of bookmarks, or tap the circle i icon button for a bookmark and choose a new section in the Edit Bookmark view.

Version 2.12.2

Bug fix:

Bookmark updating now properly continues after switching from the News view to the Bookmarks view.

See the Version 2.12 release notes for recent significant feature additions.

Version 2.12.1

Improvement and bug fixes:

New Speak News Today widget improvement: For single article bookmarks such as Wikipedia pages or HTML web pages, the number of visible lines of the article is increased so the reader can read more of the article right there in the Today widget. Tapping the article will open to that bookmark in Speak News.
When returning to the Bookmarks view from the News view, the bookmark listing will scroll to the current bookmark (with the blue diamond indicator) if it is not visible.
Fixes issues in the creation of new bookmarks from the RSS Feed Library or Speak News custom URLs. RSS news sources from the RSS Feed Library can be easily added to one's Speak News bookmarks collection.
Fixes gray text issue in the Share activity when sharing to Mail or another app that supports color-formatted text.
Fixes bug in display of the Share activities view on iPad.

See the Version 2.12 release notes for recent significant feature additions.

Version 2.12

New features in Speak News: Save Page activity, support for diacritical characters in bookmark creation, and new custom URL functionality, bug fixes:

Save Page: To save a story's web page text as a bookmark in Speak News, tap the story headline in the News view. The Activity view appears. Tap the Save Page icon button in the bottom row and a new bookmark will be created and loaded with the full text of the HTML web page. This is different from View Story or Speak Story which use the story excerpt (or full story) as contained in the RSS/Atom feed for the bookmark. Use this to read the full story right away, or to archive stories on the device for offline reading when not connected to the Internet.
New support for special diacritical characters in natural language setup of bookmarks. When using special characters in bookmark titles such as "People's Park Gardens Twitter search", the special characters are encoded in the URL. This is handled for Google News, Twitter Search, and Wikipedia page names. This automatic encoding expands on Speak News capabilities.
New custom URL support for basic search of the existing bookmark collection titles, and natural language phrase bookmark creation. Examples:
- This type of URL will open the bookmark found if the bookmark's title contains the specified phrase, such as "New York Times":
speaknews://New+York+Times
- To create a new bookmark for the Wikipedia page for "Resumé", use this URL format:
speaknews://Resumé+Wikipedia
- To create a new bookmark for a Twitter search for "Resumé service", use this URL format:
speaknews://Resumé+service+Twitter+search
- To create a new bookmark for a Google News search for "Speech Technology", use this URL format:
speaknews://Speech+Technology+Google+news
- In the creation of Speak News custom URLs, use + to replace the space characters.
Fixed scroll glitch in the "Go to section" view.

We appreciate your feedback; it helps us evolve these apps together to a better world for everyone! Please recommend or gift Speak News to your friends or colleagues. We have a lot of ideas and tasks to work on for Speak News and our other apps and appreciate your support and ideas!

Email us comments, suggestions, issues... Email:

Version 2.11

New keyboard shortcuts, screen shots, and bug fixes:

New keyboard shortcuts:
- Add New Bookmark: Command N
- Add Bookmark From Library: Shift Command N
New screenshots on the App Store, including the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR.
The items in the Voice Library Configuration view can now be rearranged with the Edit button. This will effect the order of voices used for stories.
Fixed bug in Voice Library Configuration view.
Fixed a bug for swipe deletion of bookmarks in the Bookmarks view.

Version 2.10.5

Minor interface improvements for navigating between the Bookmarks and News views.
The Sections button has been changed to an icon (five horizontal lines). It is the leftmost button in the top navigation bar of the Bookmarks and News views.
Minor punctuation corrections.

Version 2.10.4

Bug fix: Improved behavior of bookmarks view when switching in and out of Edit mode with the Edit button.

Version 2.10.3

Bug fix: Fixed crash bug in confirming changes to a bookmark section in the Edit Bookmark view.

We have a big task list with lots of great ideas for future updates to Speak News. Help us get the time and resources to make this happen. Tell your colleages and friends about Speak News, available on the App Store on iPhone and iPad. Thanks for your support!

Version 2.10.2

Numerous improvements for stability and a bug fix.

This update improves app stability based on crash reports submitted by our helpful users!
Bug fix: The speech volume, pitch and rate controls in Settings are now properly working again. They were inadvertantly disconnected in a recent update.
Note: The "Mix with other audio" option in Settings lets Speak News play text-to-speech while music or other app audio is playing. In combination with that, the "Speech volume" settings lets one adjust the balance between the text-to-speech and the other audio. This is really interesting for people who like to multitask.

Version 2.10.1

Fixed bugs in drag reordering handling for Edit mode in the Bookmarks view.
When using Edit mode in the Bookmarks view, all bookmark sections will be expanded.
Rearranging Bookmarks: To move a bookmark from one section to another without using drag and drop in Edit mode, tap the ( i ) button to open the Edit Bookmark view and tap the section button to select a new section. The bookmark will be moved to the beginning of the chosen section. To move a bookmark within a section, tap the Edit button in the Bookmarks view and use drag and drop to reposition the bookmark.

Version 2.10

New feature and bug fix:

Sections in the Bookmarks view can now be collapsed to just the section header. This is useful for hiding lesser used sections of bookmarks and makes Bookmark view browsing better.
A triangle pointing down in the Section header means the section is open, and a triangle pointing right means the section is closed.
Bookmarks in a closed section will continue to be updated during the various Update activities such as Update While Reading, Fast Background Update and Old Background Update.
The Go to Section view also displays the triangle indicating the section is open or closed.
Bug fix: Corrected the calculation of the number of items in each section in the Go To Section view.

We appreciate your feedback; it helps us evolve the Speak News app together to a better world for everyone!

Email us comments, suggestions, issues... Email:

Version 2.9.11

Bug fixes:

Corrected position of View Mode popover bar for iPhone X.
Improved button spacing behavior for different device orientations and versions of iOS from iOS 8.4 to iOS 11.x. The Speak News app dynamically configures buttons for the toolbar for easier access to functions in the app.
Fixed potential crash bug for iOS 8.x users.

Version 2.9.10

Faster app startup time for Speak News, and other improvements:

Optimized startup time for Speak News; now significantly faster.
Corrected keyboard appearance style for Edit Bookmark view and Bookmarks search bar.
Updated text-to-speech processing to improve app stability.

Version 2.9.9

Minor bug fixes in app behavior. The Go To Section command now clears and closes the Search bar if it was in use.

Version 2.9.8

Bug fix to improve speaking of abbreviations.

Version 2.9.7

Bug fixes for improved stability.

Version 2.9.6

Speak News gets some improvements and bug fixes!

The Edit Bookmark view is now in the current display style, looking much better in the dark modes.
Improved popover and view display behavior with better compatibility with versions iOS 9 through iOS 11 and different devices.
Bug fixes.

Version 2.9.5

Bug fixes:

Fixed a sometimes-occuring glitch for a two-finger tap on a news story to start text-to-speech.
Fixed a sometimes-occuring glitch for starting text-to-speech on query bookmark news views.

Version 2.9.4

Improvements for app stability and performance

Version 2.9.3

Speak News improves news query results in phrase search bookmarks ("story contains phrase") and bookmark section queries ("all stories in section") and ("all stories").

Improved parsing of dates for news feed articles.
Improved sorting of query bookmark stories.
Improvements to text-to-speech for abbreviations often used in news stories.
Improvements to app stability, performance, and popver view layout.

Version 2.9.2

Improved text-to-speech for various abbreviations.
Improvements to app stability and performance, and corrections of graphic glitches.

Version 2.9.1

Bug fix: "All stories in section" query bookmarks are now properly activated when launching the app.

Version 2.9

Useful improvements and minor bug fixes: Speak News adds new story query bookmarks: "All stories" and "All stories in section". These new query bookmarks gather a collection of stories from other bookmarked feeds as they are updated, sorted with the most recent first. It's a great way to collect stories from one's various bookmarked feeds, for reading or listening with text-to-speech.

Speak News provides eyes-free listening to news feeds, Twitter feeds, Wikipedia pages, and web pages, and is great for listening to one's desired material while traveling, studying, researching and working.

How the "all stories" queries work:

Use the phrase "all stories" as the title of a bookmark and the bookmark will aggregate recent stories from other bookmarks as they are loaded.
The "all stories" query gets stories from all RSS and Atom feeds in the bookmarks collection, as they are updated. The query bookmark can be located anywhere in the bookmarks collection.
To set the maximum number of story items for query bookmarks, open the Settings view and configure "Maximum items in queries" to the desired number.
The "all stories in section" query bookmark gets stories from RSS and Atom feeds in the same section as the query bookmark itself. The query bookmark can be located anywhere in the desired section.
Processing of queries has been optimized for better app responsiveness to user interaction.
Improved text-to-speech for Google news feeds. Reminder: Google news feeds can be easily created for a topic: Use the phrase "(topicphrase) Google news" in the title field of a new bookmark in the Edit Bookmark view. For instance, "forest health Google news". One can easily use the dictation key on the keyboard to speak the query phrase into the bookmark.
Improved utility of stepper control in Settings.
Fixed glitches in Today Widget.
Updated Apps by Imaja in App Info view: Speak News, TelepaText, CalReader, Perspectiva, TaskInsight and Astral Blossom.

Version 2.8.2

Improvement and a bug fix:

Search bar style now matches overall Display style.
Fixed problem with speech stopping for Wikipedia articles.

Version 2.8.1

Improvements and bug fixes:

The Speak News Today Widget displays excerpts of stories from one's current bookmark. The list of excerpts automatically scrolls so one can simply read several items.
A Speak News bookmark can be an RSS / ATOM news feed, a keyword filtered set of stories, a Wikipedia page, a Google new search, a Twitter feed, keyword search, or hashtag search.
Minor text-to-speech improvements and bug fixes
Fixed bugs in the Today Widget display.

Version 2.8

Text-to-speech and Today Widget improvements, bug fixes:

Improved text-to-speech for Wikipedia articles. Footnote numbers and ISBN, doi, and other types of references are muted (not spoken) in text-to-speech.
Improved Speak News Today Widget display for Wikipedia and web page articles.
Improved news feed processing to remove duplicate items from badly formed RSS feeds.
Bookmarks view now properly scrolls to the section chosen in the Sections view.

Version 2.7.13

Improvements and bug fixes:

Bookmarks are now automatically updated from the Internet if modified in the Edit Bookmark view.
Minor layout improvements.
Fixed a bug in removal of extraneous phrases for readability.

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Version 2.7.12

Bug fixes:

Fixed crash when reordering voices in the Voice library configuration view.
Long Wikipedia articles or HTML pages were inadvertantly truncated.

Version 2.7.11

Improvements and fixes:

Improved speakability of text content by removing more extraneous phrases.
Fixed bug with timing when using the Update While Reading action, including when device is not connected to the Internet.
Bookmarks view is now properly updated after changing Text Size in iOS Settings > Display & Brightness.

Version 2.7.10

Bug fix for deleting bookmarks.

This fixes problems with swipe left to delete gestures and the Edit mode Delete button.

Version 2.7.9

Minor bug fix

Version 2.7.8

Updated for iOS 11
Fixed toolbar button spacing issues on iOS 11

We love to hear from users. Email us comments, suggestions, issues... Email:

Version 2.7.7

Minor update to Speak News for new RSS URL format for Google News.

RSS URLs can be automatically generated from simple text phrases, making it easy to add bookmarks to your RSS new feed collection.

Version 2.7.6

Improvements to Speak News:

Improved parsing of Wikipedia articles.
Footnote numbers in brackets in Wikipedia articles are not spoken.

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Version 2.7.5

Improvements and minor bug fix:

Improved 'natural language' support for custom URL handler. URLs of the following form will opened in Speak News to create a new bookmark with the appropriate URL to access the given site. If the URL/bookmark already exists in Speak News, it will be selected in the Bookmarks view.

speaknews://story+contains+(searchtext)

speaknews://(name)+tweets

speaknews://(name)+hashtag

speaknews://(searchtext)+twitter+search

speaknews://(searchtext)+google+news

The instances of (searchtext) and (name) must be replaced with the desired name or text, and spaces must be replaced with +.

These speaknews:// URLs will be automatically made into active links in various text apps on the iPhone and iPad and can be used as a way to add bookmarks to the Speak News collection.

Version 2.7.4

New feature and bug fixes for Speak News -- Enjoy!

New Header saturation control in Settings to control the color saturation of story headers. Set this to zero to make headers the same color as text, and set it to 1.0 to give the headers a blue tint.
Bug fix: Fixed behavior of "Speak upon opening feed", "Pause speech upon leaving app" and "Continue speech upon activating app" options.

Version 2.7.3

Optimization and improvement:
• Faster and more comprehensive code for displaying special characters and emojis in text of stories.

Version 2.7.2

New feature, changed defaults for new users, and a bug fix.
• Added publisher-provided copyright message from RSS/ATOM feeds to end of story listing in News view. Some feeds do not include a copyright message.
• Default bookmarks to news sites for first time app users have been removed. This only effects first time users of the app.
Bookmarks to news sites may be added manually and from Imaja's Feed Library on the web. To add a new bookmark, tap the + Add New Bookmark button in the bottom toolbar of the Bookmarks view. Then tap Add From Feed Library or Add Manually.
• Minor bug fix: Corrected automatic extraction of RSS feed URLs from regular web pages for certain cases.

Version 2.7.1

This update improves Speak News, Imaja's' highly efficient news reader that helps you focus on the gist of the news.
• Improved RSS/Atom feed URL discovery that is supported by some web sites:
- Added support for relative URLs for RSS feeds embedded in some HTML pages.
- Added support for Atom feed URLs embedded in some HTML pages.
• Minor bug fixes.

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Version 2.7

New features and optimizations:
• New navigation gesture: Swipe from the right edge of the Bookmarks view to open the News view. This complements the swipe from left edge gesture in the News view to open the Bookmarks view. Think of the Bookmarks view and News view as being side by side.
• New command in Update Feeds: Old Background Update. This updates only feeds that are older than the "Update interval" in Settings, performing the updates in the background. Browsing other feeds can be performed while the background updates are running. The background updates will stop automatically when finished, or one can stop the updates by tapping the Stop Update Feeds button (circle arrow in square).
• Improved background updating performance. The app now skips over recently updated and disabled feeds.
• Layout improvement: a bit more spacing between stories on the iPad for readability.

Version 2.6

User interface improvements and bug fixes:
• Improved story length buttons in the bottom toolbar, and in the Settings view, to indicate which length is active.
• Added icons to the Update Feeds view to help indicate the actions.
• Updating HTML pages and Wikipedia pages is now much faster.
• Increased the color saturation of the blue headlines a bit to make them more distinct from the body text.
• Bookmarks can now only be deleted or moved when Update While Reading and Fast Background Update are not operating.
• Smooth scrolling is now stopped when sharing a story.
• Fixed a bug with smooth scrolling.
• Fixed a bug where speech would sometimes inadvertantly restart upon activating the app.

This app remains our main app throughout the day for keeping in touch with the vast quantity of important issues throughout the world. We hope it helps you as well. We love to hear from users. Email us comments, suggestions, issues... Email:

Version 2.5.5

Bug fix:
• The app was freezing sometimes after loading a feed that had a parsing error. This has been fixed! Phew!

Version 2.5.4

Bug fixes:
• Speaking of stories now proceeds in the intended order.
• Conversions of some common abbreviations to spoken text now works better.

We love to hear from users. Email us comments, suggestions, issues... Email:

Version 2.5.3

This Speak News app update improves news bookmarks navigation:
• Choose Section button at the top left of the News view lets one load the first bookmark in the chosen section of the bookmarks collection. Following this action, one may choose to start Update While Reading or Fast Background Update by tapping the Update button in the bottom left.

We love to hear from users. Email us comments, suggestions, issues... Email:

Version 2.5.2

New improvements and bug fixes for Speak News:
• Choosing a section now selects the first bookmark in the section as the current bookmark for the News view.
• Update buttons now properly indicate status.
• When using Choose Section, the first bookmark in the chosen section is updated from the Internet or cache to be ready for viewing.

Version 2.5.1

Improvements for Twitter pages and special character display:
• Changed the way Twitter feed links work. Tap the feed page title to open that bookmark in the Twitter app. This could be a Twitter user page, a hashtag page or a search page. Tap a tweet to share it via Message, Mail, Twitter, Reminders, Add to Notes, and more in the activities view.
• Improved special character translations.

Version 2.5.1

Version 2.5

Improvements and bug fixes.
• Added Enabled switch for bookmarks. Only enabled bookmarks will be updated. Disabled bookmarks will continue to display stories/items from the last update.
• Reminder: Innovative remote control item navigation feature. Double tap the center button to skip to the next item (a news story or page paragraph). Triple tap the center button to skip to the previous item. Tap five times to switch to bookmark selection mode. Listen to the names of bookmarks in sequence and tap after hearing the desired item to select it. Speak News will start speaking the bookmark stories if the "Speak upon opening feed" in Settings is on, or tap the remote center button to start or pause speaking.
• New bookmarks are now properly updated automatically after being created.
• Fixed problems with using the EarPods remote control to select a new bookmark.

Version 2.4.1

Improvements and bug fixes:
• Improved "spoken indicator" behavior that displays when a story or paragraph item has been spoken. To see the spoken indicator, turn on Settings: Speech behavior: Speak items only once.
• Update button is now the first button in the toolbar in both Bookmarks and News views.
• Layout of Speak News App Info view improved for various versions of iOS.
• Minor interface improvements.
• Updated icons for other apps from Imaja: TelepaText, Perspectiva, and CalReader.

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Version 2.4

New features:
• New option in Settings: Speech behavior: Speak items only once. Speak News keeps track of items listened to for a given set of items/stories in a bookmark. To automatically skip over items already listened to, turn this option on. Manually selecting an item will speak the item. If the "Speak items only once" option is on, then the "spoken indicator", a circle, appears at the end of the item title or paragraph. An empty circle means the item has not been spoken yet, and a full circle means the item has been spoken. If the bookmark is a Wikipedia page or HTML page, then each paragraph will have the spoken indicator.
• New command in Settings: View source. To view the RSS or HTML source code for the current bookmark in the News view, tap View source. This can help webmasters debug issues with their RSS feeds. To return to a readable News view, tap the View mode button in the toolbar and choose a new view mode: Headlines, Short, Medium, Full.
• Added indication of voices not downloaded in Voice Library configuration view.

Version 2.3.1

New features and bug fixes for Speak News, text-to-speech, RSS news reader, Wikipedia reader, Tweet reader:
• Added (i) button at the top right of News view to open the Edit Bookmark view.
Bug fixes:
• Edit Bookmark view now shows the containing section and the feed type of the given bookmark. The section is a button to choose a different section for the bookmark.
• Changing the section of a bookmark in the Edit Bookmark view while the Bookmarks view is displaying a Search listing works now.
• New bookmarks are now properly added to the beginning of the section chosen in the Edit Bookmark view.

Version 2.3

This Speak News app update includes three new features: Wikipedia page bookmarks, query bookmarks for cached stories containing a phrase, and a new natural language custom URL format.

Open the Speak News 2.3 release notes in Speak News for speaking > (iPhone or iPad)

Use “pagetitle wikipedia” in the Title field of a new bookmark to load the Wikipedia page for the given page title. The Wikipedia printable version of the page is what is loaded. For example, “bicycle Wikipedia”. Wikipedia pages are cached on the device for offline reading. To create a Wikipedia bookmark, tap the + (Add Bookmark) in the Bookmarks toolbar, tap Add Manually, then tap the dictation button in the keyboard and speak the desired phrase into the Title field, such as “bicycle Wikipedia”. Tap OK to confirm creation of the new bookmark. Wikipedia page titles are case sensitive in the case of names of people or places (pronouns).
Use “story contains phrase” in the Title field of a new bookmark to create a query for stories that contain the given phrase. For example, “story contains solar panel”. Use the dictation button on the keyboard to speak the phrase “story contains solar panel” into the Title field.
Wikipedia pages and regular web pages referenced by Speak News bookmarks are presented as sequences of paragraphs that can be navigated with the earphones remote control. Double-tap the center button to speak the next paragraph, triple-tap to speak the previous paragraph. The next and previous buttons in the bottom toolbar also work.
The Speak News Custom URL Scheme supports adding booksmarks by specifying natural language queries. For example:
speaknews://NYTimes+tweets
speaknews://politics+hashtag
speaknews://bicycle+twitter+search
speaknews://wind+energy+google+news
speaknews://story+contains+green+jobs
speaknews://electrolyte+wikipedia
Bug fixes.

Version 2.2.2

Bug fixes:

Fixed story speaking sequence glitch.
Fixed bug in Choose Section action.

Version 2.2.1

Bug fixes.

Fixed text style glitches during background updates.
Fixed smooth scrolling interruption in foreground News view during background updates.

Version 2.2

Improved interface controls and minor bug fix.

Update Feeds and Add New Bookmarks views are now popovers in the app's current display style on iPad and iPhone. This is easier to use, and nicer on the eyes when using one of the dark mode display styles.
Reorganized Settings options.
Corrected Update button for Stop Updates (circle arrow inside square) in Bookmarks view.

Version 2.1

Speak News gets some cool improvements and bug fixes!

New Voice library configuration view: Select which voices will used for speaking stories. Voices are selected in order The Library includes all voices available on the device. To download high-quality voices for various languages, go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Speech > Voices on the device.
Improved controls for View Mode and Display Style in Settings.
Improved toolbar buttons for iPad and iPhone in both portrait and landscape orientations.
The set of toolbar buttons is optimized for each model of iPhone based on the screen size and orientation. Rotate the phone to landscape mode to reveal more buttons. On some devices, buttons will appear in the top toolbar when they do not fit in the bottom toolbar.
Improved organization in Settings view with section headers.
Added more speech feedback for user actions. To use speech feedback, turn it on in the Settings view (the gear icon button).
Improved status messages for long view update tasks.
Added keyboard commands to scroll to top, bottom, up and down in News view.
Toolbar button color is properly updated after changing Display Style.
Choose Section popover in the Edit Bookmark view on an iPad now has a Cancel button.

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Version 2.0

Open “New Features in Speak News 2” in Speak News for speaking > (iPhone or iPad)

Major Improvements!

Better multitasking for reading and getting news for offline reading. Update All Feeds (Fast) now operates in the background and lets you read any news feeds in the foreground.
International language support for text-to-speech: There a new option in Settings: Use voice for story language. A text-to-speech voice appropriate to the language of a story can be automatically selected. To download high-quality voices for various languages, go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Speech > Voices on the device.
New feature: Follow news topics! Query downloaded RSS news feed stories for keywords and create collections of stories from different sources. Queries work with downloaded content, even when offline!
To create a news topic query:
- Tap + in the bottom toolbar of the Bookmarks view.
- Tap Add Manually...
- Use “story contains keyword” in the Title field of the Edit Bookmark view. Replace the word “keyword” with the desired search word. Click OK to confirm changes to the bookmark.
- Use one of the Update Feeds options. As bookmarks are loaded, stories that match queries will be added to those query bookmarks.
- To update query bookmarks based on only on local cached bookmark data, turn off “Auto-update if old” in Settings.
- Speak News will automatically put a magnifying glass icon at the beginning of query bookmarks in the Bookmarks view.
- Stories in a query bookmark are prefixed with the name of the source bookmark.
Support for reading a Feedly OPML file to import RSS news feed URLs in bulk.
- You need to be logged into your Feedly account.
- Open http://feedly.com/i/opml in your web browser.
- Tap the “DOWNLOAD YOUR FEEDLY OPML” button.
- Copy the link of the page that appears.
- Open the Bookmarks view in Speak News.
- Tap the + button and Add Manually to create a new bookmark in Speak News and use the URL of your OPML file.
- Open the OPML bookmark.
- The OPML file should load automatically, otherwise tap the circle arrow button at the bottom of the News view, and tap Update This Feed and it will load the OPML file.
- A confirmation alert appears.
- New bookmarks will be created for unique XML URLs in the OPML file. Duplicate URLs in the OPML will be skipped.
- The new bookmarks are added to the end of the collection in the Bookmarks view.
Added support for Twitter and Google URLs as a type of bookmark.
Shortcuts can be used to create Twitter and Google News bookmarks.
- Tap “+” and Add Manually to create a new bookmark.
- Enter one of the following phrases into the Title field in the Edit Bookmark view, replacing the bracketed [word] with the desired text:
  - [twitteruser] tweets
  - [hashtag] hashtag
  - [searchtext] twitter search
  - [searchtext] google news
- The phrase will be automatically converted to a URL for a feed that Speak News will parse into tweets or stories.
Tweets are optimized for screen reading and text-to-speech by optional replacement of URLs with a link icon. The elimination of user icons and tweet images simplifies the reading experience by removing distractions.
The format of Twitter URLs:
Tweets for a specific user:
https://twitter.com/SpeakNewsApp/tweets
Tweets with a hashtag:
https://twitter.com/hashtag/SpeakNewsApp
Search tweets:
https://twitter.com/search?q=iPhone
https://twitter.com/search?q=%22iOS+10%22
Opening a tweet item in Speak News using the Open in Safari in the Share view will present the option to open the link into the Twitter app using a twitter://... custom URL. Once this is approved, tweet items will load directly into the Twitter app.

Ease of use improvements:

Speech control buttons are added to the Bookmark view on iPad and when the iPhone is in landscape orientation for better access.
Support for getting the RSS feed URL automatically from a web site, if supported by the particular web site. Create a bookmark manually and use the regular URL for a web site, and Speak News will try to automatically get the RSS feed URL.
Update All Feeds (Fast) action now works in the background, so you can keep reading news while other sources are updated.
Updated for iOS 10! This updates the visual style of the Speak News Today widget for iOS.
If a feed has a validation error (indicated with the yellow triangle ! icon), there will be a Validate feed URL link displayed in the Edit Bookmark view. Tap the link to see the feed validation error messages generated by https://validator.w3.org. This feature is useful for news publishers and webmasters who want to improve the coding of their RSS feeds.
Improvements to special character HTML code translation.
New option in Settings for Bookmarks view: Use dot bar for item count
If smooth scrolling is interrupted by manual scrolling, then smooth scrolling will resume after a moment.

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Version 1.1.1

Update Feeds toolbar button (circle arrow) now toggles to Stop Updating Feeds (circle arrow in square) when feeds are being updated. Tap it to stop updating feeds.

Version 1.1

Improved animation for left and right swipe gestures in the News view to move to the next and previous bookmark.
Improved display updates in Bookmarks view when using Update All Feeds.
Refined text colors for better readability.
Fixed update glitches.

Version 1.0.3

Great news! Speak News is now faster!
Improved speed in loading and display news feeds.
Smooth scrolling is now automatically faster when using the speeding reading functions in Update Feeds.
Improved special character translations.
Corrected scroll position upon opening a news feed.

Version 1.0.2

We fixed some bugs, because we use this app a lot; we love making Speak News a great text to speech RSS news reader.

If Speak News was speaking when the user receives a notification from the system or another app, then Speak News resumes the speaking after the user dismisses the notification.
Parser error messages are now properly cleared.
If app purchase is not validated with App Store, then bookmarks will not be saved. The App Store will request that user validates the app with their Apple ID and password.

Version 1.0.1

Enhancements and bug fixes.

Updated Speak News RSS feed library with more news sources.
Fixed bug in app purchase verification resulting in limit of bookmarks to ten.
Added icon indicators for bookmarks that have RSS feed parsing errors.

Version 1.0

First release

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Support

For questions, bug reports, and feature requests for Speak News, please contact Imaja via e-mail. We will try to respond within a day, usually much sooner.

> E-mail Support:

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