# Umano App Reads the News To You With Help From Voice Actors



## TechSocial (Dec 20, 2011)

One-Liner Pitch: SoThree's first app, Umano, reads articles aloud so you can catch up on the news while driving or working out at the gym.

Why It's Taking Off: The founders believe that audio recordings may help publishers generate more engagement and revenue for news stories on mobile.

After having known each other for years and worked together at Google, Ian Mendiola, Anton Lopyrev, and Prabhdeep Gill knew they wanted to start a company together. They just didn't know what they wanted it to be.

"We started the company having no idea what we were going to work on," Mendiola told Mashable in an interview. The trio went through various ideas before settling on something that had bugged them for awhile: consuming news on the go. "We were the type that were totally into all the tech blogs that were out there, but not always in front of the computer and pretty active in our daily lives."

Until that point, podcasts were really the best option for people looking to multitask consuming news while doing other activities. Mendiola and his co-founders thought they could do something similar by using text-to-speech technology to read articles aloud to user. The problem, as he put it to us, is that listening to text-to-speech becomes "unbearable" after about 15 seconds.

With that in mind, they decided to do something a little different and recruit voice actors to read news stories instead. This resulted in the startup's first app, Umano, which was released on iPhone in October and on Android earlier this year.

More


----------

