I don’t have time to read the news anymore; I barely have time to listen to my favorite news podcasts. It’s hard to stay informed, but I want to know what’s going on in the world. It’s just that trying to stay on top of all of the latest happenings is a lot of work.
Cool new kid Wibbitz is making it a lot easier to get the news. It reads out news summaries, links you to articles and basically makes getting the news a really easy and dynamic experience.
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All the News That’s Fit to Print
Wibbitz isn’t really like any other app I’ve seen, and it’s difficult to quickly sum it up. It works sort of like a podcast, reading out the latest news, but Wibbitz also links you to the source story and gives you some bonus information with images and graphics. Wibbitz gathers the top stories together, summarizes them, and then reads them aloud using a variety of really lifelike but artificial voices. When I first started listening, though, it was hard to tell I wasn’t hearing a real person.
Listen to the headlines and choose a story to learn more about.
Everything is coming from Reuters to begin with, and stories are sorted into categories, like business, technology, sports and top news. In the menu, choose a topic, like politics, and tap the arrow to get a browsable list of stories, or tap the category listing itself to dive right into the first story in the list. Wibbitz will read off a list of headlines, and you’ll drag up to delve further into a story. Drag up again if you want to read the original article at Reuters or drag down to get back to the headlines.
As each story is read, images will scroll across your screen like a really well designed and topical slideshow. There’s always something going, so if Wibbitz doesn’t have a lot of visual information to impart, you might just get a large graphic of “100m” for a few seconds to accompany a sports story about a runner. Usually the images are better than that though, and Wibbitz presents you with photographs of national leaders or maps of towns referenced in stories so you can get the geography of the place.
Relevant images are displayed as you listen.
If you’re a news junkie and need more than the handful of stories that fall into each category or just want more perspective on an issue than is provided by Reuters, Wibbitz can handle that. You can add content from the main menu, again sorted into the big categories. There are lots of news outlets here, though I’ll admit I wish there were more. The “local” news isn’t very local to me, and I’d like to see more options there.
Getting It Right
The natural voices are just that, natural. I didn’t pick up on the fact that they were generated right away. Sure, there’s at least one that really doesn’t match up to the others, and there are times Wibbitz just gets it completely wrong. Intonation is sometimes off, pacing can be weird and Wibbitz isn’t great with names. On the whole, though, it’s pretty good at what it does.
There plenty of different categories, and you can return to the menu or keep going when a story concludes.
There’s a similar issue with the images that accompany the articles. Because the images are being pulled as you listen to the summary and not ahead of time by a real, living person, there’s room for Wibbitz to make some errors. On the whole, I’ve gotten lots of great photographs of world leaders, maps of important cities and towns, and images of current events. I’ve also gotten stock photos of money to accompany a banking report, which gives me absolutely no context for anything. Even worse, Wibbitz misidentified a central character in a recent news story; it displayed several different images of an athlete who happened to share the name of a lottery winner.
That’s the Way It Is
Adding more technology or business news to your lineup doesn’t actually add those outlets to the technology and business categories when you’re listening to the news stories. Those main categories stay Reuters-centric, and any added outlets get their own category listing at the bottom, pulled out from the rest. This isn’t a deal-breaker, but the app flows really well and would work much more seamlessly if additional news agencies could be incorporated into the main categories.
It would be nice if all stories of a similar theme were in the same category.
Speaking of seamlessly, where’s the autoplay? Wibbitz will just rattle off the headlines, but when you drill down into a story, the app will only read off one at a time. You’ll have to manually select each headline you want Wibbitz to read. That’s a bummer, because if I’m getting ready in the morning, I don’t want to have to constantly stop what I’m doing to fiddle with my phone.
Good Night, and Good Luck
The reading voices make some mistakes and Wibbitz showed me some incorrect images, but they were nothing that could mislead me about the facts of a story. The stories are summarized, and Wibbitz uses a fancy algorithm to do this that I won’t even pretend to understand. The thing is, it works. The summaries make sense and give you the most important points.
While there is room for improvement, Wibbitz definitely knocks it out of the park. It looks great and is a simple way to get yourself informed quickly. I love being able to listen to the stories while I focus on something else, but if a headline catches my attention, Wibbitz will take me to the story, right on my phone.
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