NewsAloud Review

To say the least, this program is cumbersome. When you first open it, a prompt asks what news feeds you would like to receive. You are given a rather broad selection, ranging from Sports to Business. However, the only two news feeds supported are from Yahoo and Reuters. While these are okay at best, variety is still the spice of life. This program? Not too spicy...it gets worse from here.

Once you've selected your desired news, you finally get to see the user interface. It's about as pretty as Microsoft Notepad, and as intuitive as a cardboard automobile. Where one would at least expect a big button that says something along the lines of "Gather News Now," one instead must go into a taskbar to get to said command.

Once you've gathered news, which it does at a reasonable, but not in any way impressive pace (this test was done using a high-speed cable modem), you really get a taste of what this program is all about. News is presented in a straight list, simply giving the headline, category (Sports, Politics, etc.), time retrieved, and file size. There is no color, and the text is small and close together, making the headlines difficult to read for those with impaired vision.

Finally, we get to the real "selling point." We figure out how to get our little electronic friend, "Mary," to tell us the news. Well, if you can recall way back to when electronic speech was first introduced to the PC, you already know what "Mary" sounds like. Inconsistent pacing of speech, often choppy pronunciations, and regularly entirely indiscernible words. There are no controls allowing you to alter her voice, other than a dysfunctional "Pronunciation Editor" which has given me unexplained error messages and only is for teaching "Mary" how to translate common internet abbreviations, such as "btw" (by the way, "nm" (not much), etc. into proper words.