Tech Cast Now

Reviewers Comments (Alan Holbrook):

I'm have a long commute and listen to a lot of podcast and audio books. I'm teaching a new class this term and have always found it useful ro review my class notes prior to the class. I have all my notes on my private web page so I decided I'd like look for an app that would read the notes to me. I tried a couple different apps and decided I liked this one. 

Web Talk is an app that reads the contents of web pages.  It's limited to a single male and single female voice. They are basic computerized voices that you wouldn't want to use for listening to a novel, but suffice for my type of application as a utility to listen to basic web content.  There are controls for volume and speech rate.  One of the best features is that the app provides a 'bookmarklet' that lets you launch it for any page you're currently viewing in Safari.  If you're not familiar with a bookmarklet it's a short piece of javascript that can be saved as a bookmark in the browser.  In this case it creates a bookmark that, when accessed while viewing a web site, copies the current URL and launches Web Talk with that page. You can set it to automatically start playing or use manual control.  One nice feature is that you can use the iPhone's copy feature to select the text you want Web Talk to read.   When you select text, as though you were going to copy and paste, you can tap the play button and it will read that text to you.  In the automated mode it attempts to read the whole page. On complex web pages with lots of <div> tags or frames it may not always start in the right place.  

It has very basic built in help and the web support site is limited to a youtube video demo.  Over all I found this worked well for my purpose.  For 99 cents it's worth having on hand. 

Evaluation 1-10 Stars: (What's this mean?)

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Cost: Free / $0.99	iTunes Link     Support Site

Vendor Description: Web Talk 2.0 for iPhone OS 3.1.2 uses text to speech technology along with web page content recognition to read web pages to you. You can configure web pages to be read as soon as they are loaded, read pages manually after they are loaded, or use Cut, Copy, & Paste to read only sections of text.