Speak News app for iPhone, iPad, iOS - Text-to-speech reader of news RSS Feeds

Speak News

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

Update History

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: support@imaja.com

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: support@imaja.com

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: support@imaja.com

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: support@imaja.com

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: support@imaja.com

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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