Reader for Gmail lets you listen to your unread mails [UPDATE]

Have you almost gotten caught by the police because you had to read an important email while driving? Or do you have to pull over every once in a while because you’re waiting for a very important email from a client? Or maybe you’re just too busy to sit down and go through unread emails? These are just some scenarios when a voice assistant will really come in handy. Reader for Gmail wants to be that app that will virtually make your email life easier.

Even though there have been a lot of text to speech apps before, they mostly alert you to notifications or read your text messages. There are some that lets you dictate to them and they’ll text it or post it for you. But Reader for Gmail, as the name implies, just simply wants to read out loud your unread Gmail messages for you. Using Android’s Text-to-Speech (TTS) program, you can set it to automatically read incoming messages when you’re too busy to read them yourself. You also don’t need to enter your password every time since it uses Google’s OAuth2 technology.

However, if the email is a mini-novel in itself, Reader for Gmail can’t read it entirely for you. You can set it to read the sender, subject, date sent and the email summary, which is just the first two sentences of the message. This will work well for those who send you brief emails only, but even for the longer ones, at least you know what the gist of the message is (unless they start off with a long-winded intro). You can also schedule the app for when it will read out your messages. It also has a floating control panel so you can play, pause or go to the next or previous email.

Since it’s still a new app, the developer is offering a two-week free trial for the premium version when you download it from the Google Play Store. After the trial expires, the basic features will remain and you can switch to premium through an in-app purchase. The developer also encourages suggestions and feedback to enhance the app, so expect a lot of updates and changes soon.

[UPDATE] Reader for Gmail has changed its name and is now known as Mail Reader.

VIA: XDA Developers