Speaking Email - voice reader 4+

Revision - to Very Good

I am very overdue to correct my original review of this app - so I need to restore my own integrity - my apologies to the developer.

I was very wrong about the voice recognition piece - I made the mistake of blaming the app when it was my poor Bluetooth in car mic (even though it was new).

After I purchased (a great) Plantronics Voyager 104 Bluetooth headset, then I quickly realized my error and incorrect rating.

In terms of the App, I was fairly happy, and it really did make a listening (and replying by voice) to emails while driving very possible.

I still had some trouble editing a response without having to start from scratch, which was frustrating if I needed to correct one word within a response I verbally created, but I know the developer was making incremental improvements to this, and they were very open to listening to feedback. Pretty impressive.

One thing that was always challenging was to clearly understand how the settings, some of which seemed to overlap potentially in how and which emails come in, and I could never be confident that the app, even if left running, would pick up where I last left off (so I had to set to always read a specific number of emails - e.g. always read 30).

However, overall a very good app and worth the ability to deal with email if you are commuting.

Developer Response ,

Hi John, thanks very much for updating your review.

There are a lot of settings but I am not aware of any particular that don't work together. For example if you switch on both "play only unplayed" and "play only unread", Speaking Email will only read out emails that it has never played before and are marked unread on your mail server. Think of this as a filter which is applied on each email: the given email must be both unread on the server and unplayed on the phone. That combination of settings might be what you need to avoid having to jump to email 30 all the time.

Thanks to your comments we have decided to change the app to attempt to keep its place if it has been open in the background for less than 6 hours. After 6 hours we expect there will be a number of new emails so it is most helpful to do a full mail check and restart from the top of the inbox. This was previously 1 hour.

New emails are always slotted into the reading order anyway, so getting new emails in the meantime within 6 hours should be fine - you will hear your latest emails after the next email is finished reading.

Best customer service!!

The way this app functions is tremendous especially for someone like me who can no longer look at my smartphone due to my eye problem. So the app works very smoothly and it is easy to learn and very easy to use. I highly recommend it. The best part is superb customer service. I wrote to the company about an issue I was having and the app developer corresponded with me in less than an hour and actually fixed a bug in the system and the problem was corrected within a few hours. It is so helpful to be able to speak directly and quickly to the app developer. This is such a helpful and beneficial product, it is so well done. I highly highly recommend purchasing it. It is well worth the money to stay with the premium edition. Because of this app my eyes are already feeling the relief.

I use this App Every Day

I have trouble focusing on one task at a time. I use this app to help me with email overload. It helps me deal with triaging my email to get it to a point where I do not feel paralyzed about where to start and how to go about filing, deleting, marking as spam, unsubscribing, etc. I cannot thank Mike and his team enough for making this app. I wish Apple would invest in this app to make it a part of the core OS. I also love that this app works on Apple’s M series based computers. I hope this app continues to flourish and grow because it is fantastic.