Literal newsreader app

August 25, 2023 10:58 AM

While I'm driving, it would be nice to hear the news, since I can't read it. I can tune in the radio, sure, but it's pretty much just the oasis of NPR in a sea of conservative extremist media. So I'm wondering if there is a way to listen to NYTimes or WaPo articles (for example) from my iPhone's web browser. Perhaps some iOS accessibility functionality, but perhaps something that is more automatic in reading text from articles I select to listen to whilst driving, instead of having to highlight text and copy and manually paste it into a reader, which I can't do while driving. Does such a thing exist?
posted by They sucked his brains out! to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Response by poster: To be clear, I'm not asking about podcasts, but automated or hands-free ways to translate articles from actual news sites into audio while driving.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:59 AM on August 25, 2023

Some read-it-later services will do text-to-speech. You would need some way of getting the articles into the service, either manually (e.g. browse the website ahead of time and click a bookmarklet to send selected articles to your service) or automatically (many services can ingest via an RSS feed or similar). Instapaper's premium version could do this, but I don't know how good it is.
posted by brentajones at 11:01 AM on August 25, 2023

Depending on which Apple services you're subscribed to, you may have access to News+, which includes audio (Apple's daily news roundup, plus recordings of articles from various publications.)
posted by emelenjr at 11:28 AM on August 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

NYTimes has an iOS Audio app. According to its help doc it features access to it's podcasts (which to be fair, you can get via any podcast app) but also narrated articles. You need to have a subscription to NYTimes however.
posted by cgg at 11:53 AM on August 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: The Pocket app will read articles that you have saved out loud for you.
posted by Roger Pittman at 11:58 AM on August 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

I have the WaPo app and most (every?) news story has an audio version right on the front page.
posted by pantarei70 at 1:48 PM on August 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Best answer: The Economist has a serious audio version which is the print articles read by a professional. The app makes it very easy to listen to any specific article; not sure if there's a simple way to queue them but it looks possible, see this FAQ.
posted by Nelson at 2:27 PM on August 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

Android Auto will surface news apps from NPR and the like so that you can get things like top stories and the like read to you.
posted by mmascolino at 5:45 AM on August 26, 2023