If you remember this week's release of SpeakEvents, then you know where this is going. Aloud is an awesome new jailbreak tweak by iOS developer Ori Kadosh that will speak your notifications when you get them using Samantha’s voice (The voice that powers Siri). If you are hard at seeing or you have been searching for an easy way to know what notifications you are getting when you are away from your screen, then you will love Aloud. Additionally, it comes with more preferences than SpeakEvents and costs half as much (for a limited time that is)!
Once we have installed Aloud from Cydia, there is a long list of preferences from the Settings application that we can dig into. First and foremost, we have the ability to enable and disable the tweak at our leisure. Under that are some settings for adjusting the voice, picking the applications that Aloud will announce, rules for how the notifications will be heard, rules for activation, custom read formats, and activator actions that you can use for a variety of actions for Aloud. As just a brief summary, we will now show you each of the features in depth.
Voice Settings
The voice settings give you the capability to change the language of the speaking voice from a list of over 30 different languages, change the rate at which the voice speaks, change the volume of the voice when it speaks, and the ability to suppress the notification tri-tone sound that will fire off when you get a notification from applications. Apart from being able to customize each and every one of these features, you can also enable or disable their influence via an on and off switch for each section, which gives you a wide variety of control for how you will hear Aloud.
Applications
From the applications settings you can pick which applications will have their notifications announced by Aloud. By default, all applications are announced when you get a notification, although selecting applications from the list will exclude them from being announced. If you want to exclude all of them and only select the applications that will have their notifications announced, then you can invert your selection and this way only the applications that you have selected will have their notifications announced.
Notifications Rules
From the notifications rules, we can pick how the notifications will be performed. The first pane allows you to have the notifications play either immediately or after you perform an Activator action – immediately is the default setting. The next pane lets you choose to have voice notifications only fire off when the device is locked, unlocked, or both. Below those panes are switches for overriding the mute switch, only hearing voice notifications when you have your headphones plugged in, only hearing notifications when the device is charging, and keeping the notifications from firing off when you’re in the middle of a call. The last pane lets you choose during what days and hours you don’t want to have any voice alerts – this is extremely useful for students who want to keep these notifications turned off during class.
Activation Rules
From the activation rules part of the preferences for Aloud, you can choose for Activator actions to be forced to listen to the settings that you set for notifications rules, or you can have any action invoked by Activator override those settings. By default, if you invoke Aloud by Activator, it will override the settings you set for the notifications rules.
Custom Formatting
Aloud’s custom-formatting section of the preferences allows you to choose how your notifications are spoken. By default, ‘dynamic’ is selected, but you can have it set to always read just the title, or just the message, or both.
Activator Actions
The last preference pane of Aloud, Activator actions, will let you select Activator actions for all of the following functions: re-speaking the last notification that was spoken in case you didn’t hear it the first item, stopping a current spoken notification in case you’re in a location where you want to remain quiet, and the ability to speak the system state – this includes the Wi-Fi information, battery percentage, and whether your device is charging or not. The last option that you can assign an activator action to is for Aloud to declare the date and time.
For what you’re getting with Aloud, the price is well worth it. Compared to SpeakEvents, I would have to say that Aloud is better in almost every single aspect. There is more customization, better functionality, and the voice notifications aren’t as long-winded. Aloud is a feature that should be embedded in every iPhone from the start. Voice notifications are very cool and help us to interact with our devices.
Trying Aloud out on our own, it works great! There are no flaws in the design, and it just works – the way that we would expect Apple to have implemented it. The tight functionality allowing you to use Activator as a powerful invoking tool for Aloud makes it even more awesome. My personal favorite part is being able to choose between having the notifications override the mute switch or not, which allows me to keep my ringer off while still being able to hear a voice notification.
Aloud will only be 99¢ for the first three days of its release. After those days are over, Aloud will cost the same amount as SpeakEvents ($1.99). Aloud requires iOS 5 and has Hands-Free Control integration. It works great with MusicBanners by iOS hacker and developer Ryan Petrich so you can hear when your songs change and what is starting to play.
Name: Aloud
Price: 99¢ (limited time)
Version: 1.0
Repo: ModMyi
Developer: Ori Kadosh
Editor's Rating: 5/5
Don't want to pay for Aloud? – No problem. Ori Kadosh was generous enough to offer to give away FIVE copies of Aloud. If you want to win, leave a comment below and complete the widget below and get the most points:
Sources: Ori Kadosh
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