Umano – Review
Umano, is a news reader with a difference, it actually contains news readers! Obviously marketed at commuters, this apps will read out news articles to you as you walk up to the station. This was originally a iphone only app, but the development team said they realized that Android should be a priority after a marketing stunt where team members boarded for San Francisco with fliers promoting the app, and they saw that many of the interested users owned Android phones.
This apps is a “out of the box” style app, where when you open it, its all there ready to be used. Though I was disappointed to see that you couldn’t add your own feeds to the app. So you had to be happy with what you got. At the time of writing there was no UK specific news pages, that I could see. I would like to see in the future the addition of BBC News, and newspapers like the Daily Mail. Having done research the news stories are chosen for you, as this means that the voice actor can read out the news article. This means you no longer get a robotic voice, instead you get the sultry tone of Noah reading to you about NASA.
You have the ability to pick from a variety of choices for the stories, including: Educational, Technology, Scientific and Inspirational. The uniqueness of this app is also its weakness. As the stories are chosen and then read out for you, this means that you can never add your own feeds or request specific news articles. You can pick a category of stories, but thats about as far as you get with it. This app is great if you want to get a start of the days news, but it will never be a replacement for something like Feedly.
This app does offer some Android specific features, such as G+ integration which is great to see. You also get the player in the notification bar, which allows you to pause or pick a new track to play. You also get the opportunity to create a playlist of stories, this can be up to twenty different news stories. The app will download them and allow you to listen to them offline, which is good for train rides as the data connection isn’t reliable.
There are lots of changes on the horizon for this app. Mendiola said he wants to add more personalization to the app, so that it can create an automatic playlist based on your interests and the length of your commute, this sounds like a great feature and one I would use. He also wants to “open up more of a voice actor marketplace,” so actors could visit the site and upload their own recordings, rather than waiting for an assignment from Umano, this would mean a larger variety of content and again another great future feature.
You can download the app below:
