Thursday, November 29, 2012 - 12:45pm
A company called SoThree, founded by three former Google engineers, has unveiled a new smartphone app for the 94 million or so in the U.S. who can't read a newspaper while driving to work. It's called Umano ("human" in Italian).
Umano's team chooses about 15 news stories a day from the web, which its team of voice actors reads and records (material that's "geeky (which is code for techy/gadget stuff), scientific, entrepreneurial, and inspirational," according to PandoDaily.com). The company hopes to expand its coverage to 100 articles a day over the next six months.
Now, if the software could incorporate local weather, traffic, and sports, they might really be on to something novel!
PandoDaily's (pretty unironic) coverage is here.