Microsoft tests iOS app that will read you the news
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Blair
Hanley Frank U.S. Correspondent Blair Hanley Frank is primarily focused
on Microsoft and its competitors in the desktop OS, office suite and
browser business for the IDG News Service, and is based in San
Francisco. More by Blair Hanley Frank
NewsCast pulls in stories from around the web and then uses text-to-speech tech to fill users in.
Microsoft is quietly testing an app that seems designed for people who
feel overwhelmed by the media’s endless stream of news stories and who
wish they had a helper app that reads them article summaries.
The app, called NewsCast, hasn’t been formally announced, but it was first spotted by Neowin’s Brad Sams.
It takes in articles from around the web and starts reading summaries
of them to users in an ongoing playlist. Users can save articles for
reading later and view the full text of any article NewsCast pulls in
using a built-in browser or a distraction-free reading view.
It’s all designed to keep users up to date on the latest news while
they’re commuting and don’t want to be staring at tiny text on their
phone.
According to a publicly-accessible webpage
for the app, NewsCast is a proof-of-concept product from the Bing News
and Speech teams and seems to only be built for testing inside
Microsoft. The teams are “trying to validate several hypothesis[sic]”
with the app, though it’s not clear what they’re testing. Collecting
feedback from users is a major focus of NewsCast’s current build—tapping
a feedback button in the app opens an email that includes a
three-question survey about what users like, dislike and want from it in
the future.
Interestingly, NewsCast is only available for iOS right now, which means
that there must be a sufficiently large group of people inside
Microsoft who use iPhones to be valuable for testing a new app. This
isn’t the first time the company has built something specifically for
Apple’s mobile platform before its own, however—multiple teams working
on projects as part of Microsoft’s Garage idea lab recently released
iOS-only apps.
For now, anyone can download the app from this website
and install it on an iPhone, though it’s not clear how long it will be
before Microsoft takes it down. Because it’s not being sent through the
App Store, users will have to give it permission to run on their device.
Microsoft isn’t the only tech company going after mobile news summaries. Facebook is reportedly testing its own
Twitter-like news app, and Yahoo has received accolades for its News
Digest app, which gives users bite-sized summaries about current events.
And of course, Apple’s own curated News app debuts with iOS 9 this fall.
A representative for Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Blair Hanley Frank U.S. Correspondent
Blair Hanley Frank is primarily focused on Microsoft and
its competitors in the desktop OS, office suite and browser business for
the IDG News Service, and is based in San Francisco.
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