Every day that you browse through your news feed and social media accounts sees you coming across articles that you want to save for reading later. But obviously, you almost always never get to them and so the list keeps piling up. One of the apps that people use to save those articles is Pocket, acquired by Mozilla last year, and now they have redesigned the app to make it easier to get to those links, videos, articles. Well, eventually.
Listening to articles is one of the ways that Pocket believes you’ll be able to eventually consume all the content that you’ve saved (and will save) on the app. While you could actually previously do that, now you’ll get a more natural-sounding voice to read stuff to you. It uses Amazon’s Polly text-to-speech service so you don’t get a robotic voice anymore which turned off some people when the feature was introduced a few years back. Now it’s much more conducive for listening not just because of the voice but also the features.
It’s like you’re listening to your very own curated podcast with news and articles that you find interesting and listening to it while you’re doing other activities like driving, exercising, washing dishes, etc. You don’t even have to keep tapping it to move to the next article. After it finishes one, it will just go on to the next. But you can also control it with buttons for skipping ahead. You can even adjust the speed of the recording. It doesn’t have offline features for now, but it will probably have one soon.
As for the look, they’ve made it look a bit more relaxing to read as there is more white space and information density has been reduced. If you prefer a dark mode or sepia mode, you can also choose that as your app-wide color scheme. Even the typography and fonts have also been updated with ones that are more conducive to comfortable reading.
This marks the first major redesign for Pocket since 2012. Mozilla is indeed trying to make its mark on the app with all these changes. Hopefully it will help us make headway towards actually reading, or listening, to all of these saved articles.
