Please suggest an app for listening to the news

[relztrah]

On my daily commute I would like to listen to US and world news. On my car radio I can't get any of the news stations. Is there an app that I can download and listen to streaming news for those 20 minutes to and from work each day? It can be any service such as BBC, MSNBC, or whatever. I know it will use data and my Ultra Mobile plan only allows 100 MB per month. (Hey, what do you want for $19 a month?) But I can buy extra data for $10 a GB. Obviously I don't want video, only audio.

I get a good T-Mobile signal (the network Ultra uses) on my commute so I'm wondering if there's a way to listen to the news streaming on my Android phone. I'd be willing to pay for noncommercial national and international news and commentary.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

 

[electricpete]

1 - If you want to save data, you can use a podcast app and have the podcast downloaded over wifi the night before while you sleep. I use BeyondPod. I get feeds from ABC News Nightline (airs in the evening... I download overnight and listen the next morning). Also NPR News gives hourly updated feeds... so if you set it to update just before you leave in the morning you have very fresh news. Global BBC News also provides frequent podcast updates. There are a lot of other news feeds but most of them are weekly or less frequent. Here is a link to BeyondPod, although there are plenty of good podcast players out there
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mobi.beyondpod

2 - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.npr.android.news <= NPR has an app which gives you access to NPR news in a variety of ways. You can stream the live audio from various npr stations (uses data). The ABC app is somewhat similar.

3 - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hyperionics.avar <= Voice aloud reader will read to you (using your phone's TTS) any web page that doesn't have a lot of heavy formatting/graphics/scripts. Doesn't use any more data than it takes to load the webpage. Just navigate to the page in your browser and share to the app. Or with Tasker and autoshortcut plugin you can create a shortcut that will launch Voice aloud reader reading a specified web address directly from desktop (without using browser). Voice aloud reader also displays text on the page and highlights the sentence it's currently speaking (so you can follow along visually if you want) and has "skip" button to jump to next sentence. This app works well on the reuters website (It doesn't work with most of the news websites that have too much formatting or something... confuses the app.). Reuters gives you a good 5 or 10 minutes of headlines with three or four sentences about each story. If anyone finds other news sites that work well with this, let me know.

4 - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mobijewels.audionews.lite <= This app (audio news lite) is supposed to do what you ask. But for me it gives an error "TTS not enabled" even though my TTS is enabled. And it seems to be trying to get me to download svox. Then still didn't work after I downloaded Svox and set it as default. None of my other apps using TTS (like #3 above) had any problem accessing my system TTS before I downloaded svox or after. So I gave this audio news lite app a bad review and uninstalled

 

[mikedt]

I concur, podcasts might be your best bet, and download them on WiFi of course. BBC does many podcasts of its radio programming. Especially as it sounds like you're on a very limited data plan, streaming could become prohibitively expensive even after just a few hours.

 

[el_gallo_azul]

I found this thread by searching for apps using search term "tts". I wanted to find an app that would be able to use TTS to read a text file to me that I have on the device. I had tried "Text to Speech (TTS)" by TK Solution, couldn't find a way to use it, contacted the developer at the email address given on the Google Play page, also contacted the developer at a different email address from within the app, got no response at all, gave terrible but honest reviews in Google Play, with no response over a period of months.

I've just tried "@Voice Aloud Reader" by Hyperionics Technology after seeing the link at item (3) of @electricpete 's post above, and the app description looking like it might work, and sure enough I tested it successfully.

I uninstalled "Text to Speech (TTS)" by TK Solution, and updated my review of that app accordingly.

I haven't found any way to change the velocity of the voice in "@Voice Aloud Reader", but it seems like it would be such a basic function that I expect it is there somewhere.

 

[electricpete]

I haven't found any way to change the velocity of the voice in "@Voice Aloud Reader", but it seems like it would be such a basic function that I expect it is there somewhere.

It's not in the app, it's an Android setting. For me (Nexus 6 running 6.0.1), it's Settings / Language and Input / Speech / Text To Speech Output / Speech Rate...

 

[el_gallo_azul]

It's not in the app, it's an Android setting. For me (Nexus 6 running 6.0.1), it's Settings / Language and Input / Speech / Text To Speech Output / Speech Rate...

Yes, thanks @electricpete , I found it later yesterday. As far as I can tell, this problem is now dealt with - great.