NewsAloud Review

I was highly disappointed when I opened up the options of the demo and did not see the voice of Microsoft Sam, or at least one that was similar to it.

Not much can truly be said of this disastrous application. Actually, I'm not really sure what the developers at NextUp were thinking when they were working out the design of this application. The interface is extremely sloppy. It appears in that nostalgic Windows 95a era interface. Honestly, the loading splash screen is more visually appealing than the application itself. The desktop shortcut was nothing more than the .exe shortcut icon.

Aside from the highly annoying robotic voice that is no where NEAR a natural human sounding voice. It does have 1 or 2 features that are entertaining, like the pronunciation editor. You can set words and sounds, for example; imo would be In My Opinion. This only remains entertaining for a few short minutes as you can see how many profane words you can get the voice of Mary to pronounce in a single article. The other feature that I just loved was how the voice and audio options dialog box would often lock up the application forcing a Ctrl+Alt+Del.

As for the news content itself, I would personally prefer to hop on google and just read the latest news myself rather than have to sort through the massive list of worthless articles to pick out just a few good ones. The Nintendo Wii News channel offers more compelling news.

I really wish I could find something good to say about this software, because I'm sure the developers spent an entire 45 minutes of hard work putting this program together. I guess I can tell you that a nice feature was added in the file menu, 'tell a friend'. I'm not exactly sure what I'm supposed to tell my friend other than to steer clear of this abomination to the software world.