Microsoft Working On An App That Reads You The News

According to a report Microsoft is working on a new mobile application that will read the news to you, the app is reportedly called NewsCast and it basically makes a playlists of major news stories and readies the summaries to you. There’s no word as yet from the company about when NewsCast might be released for the public. This app was discovered on Microsoft Azure Web Sites domain where it was available for download but has since been pulled.

The folks at Neowin spotted NewsCast on a page over at Microsoft Azure Web Sites domain, it was mentioned on the page that this app has been developed by the Bing team and it aims to make communities more productive since users can even listen to the playlist while they’re driving.

NewsCast download is no longer available but the publication did manage to grab some screenshots. Apparently this app users Bing’s text-to-speech feature to read out news snippets of up to 30 seconds. It allows users to save the summaries for later and does include a feedback button which takes them to a three-question survey most likely meant for testers who have early access to the app.

Only the iOS version of this website was up on Azure and it’s unclear on how many platforms it will be launched when Microsoft believes its ready for the public, so far the company hasn’t said anything about NewsCast.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Apps, Bing (Microsoft), Microsoft