Mozilla has announced that its read-it-later app, Pocket, now comes with a more human sounding voice, powered by Amazon Polly, for listening to articles. It also includes a whole new interface and updated fonts and typography to make reading more comfortable. In order to see the new UI or listen to the new Amazon Polly-powered voice, you’ll need to install Pocket 7.0 on Android or iOS.
Mark Mayo, Chief Product Officer of Firefox, discussing the release, said:
“At Mozilla, we love the web. Sometimes we want to surf, and the Firefox team has been working on ways to surf like an absolute champ with features like Firefox Advance. Sometimes, though, we want to settle down and read or listen to a few great pages. That’s where Pocket shines, and the new Pocket makes it even easier to enjoy the best of the web when you’re on the go in your own focused and uncluttered space. I love it.”
Once you’ve upgraded to the new client, the first thing you’ll notice is the refreshed user interface that is designed to help you stop getting distracted by removing elements such as the notification bar while you scroll through an article. The new UI introduces new dark and sepia themes throughout the app which makes reading more comfortable, additionally, the fonts and typography have been refined so you can go on reading for longer.
The other major change in this update is the inclusion of Amazon Polly, which lets you listen to articles with a more human sounding voice. While the voice does sound great generally, it does seem to stumble a little bit with acronyms such as “VPN”, where, instead of taking each letter separately, it mushes out a noise; other than that, the voice is clear and pretty easy to follow along with.
The update is available for download now so be sure to check out your respective app store for it. If you use Pocket on the web, you should get a banner notification asking if you want to join the beta which brings a new interface to the web version. The update to the web edition also fixes sharing to Facebook which had been broken for a while.
Image via Mozilla