Newsbeat : An app which read you the News while you drive

A new smartphone app developed by the Tribune Co will read aloud a personalised "playlist" of news articles along with weather and traffic updates, as the media organisation looks for new ways to reach consumers. The free Newsbeat app is the first product developed by the year-old Tribune Digital Ventures group headed by former Yahoo Inc executive Shashi Seth.

Newsbeat pulls in thousands of articles every day from hundreds of newspapers including The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and websites like CNN. From there, stories are converted to audio for easy listening during your morning commute. Sometimes the recordings are produced with the help of text-to-speech technology, much like SoundGecko; other times it's an actual human reading an article.

Newsbeat offers up a linear, skippable feed of news stories from different sources, most of them traditional news outlets like Tribune’s own newspapers. Its designers assume that most of the time you’re going to be driving or otherwise occupied, so it reads the first part of the stories to you — sometimes using a pre-recorded human’s voice, sometimes with a Siri-like robot.

Newsbeat will let you pick and choose stuff you want to hear in advance. But its designers assume that most people will just start using it without customizing the feed, so as they listen to some stories and fast forward to others, the app should get a better sense of what you want, and start playing different stuff for you.