Leading with this even though I haven’t actually tried it yet – but it’s definitely my next stop in the quest to process my email by audio/voice. Astrobot was first a voice assistant dedicated to email, now the iOS app lets you read (listen, I’m hoping), manage, and reply to emails without leaving Astro’s iOS and Android apps. Thanks @danielilkovich for alerting me to this one.

Thanks to the team at Play.ht for making me my own audio subscription service for people to listen to my medium posts as they come out. It’s read in Siri voice, so…be prepared for that. But at least now you can run on the treadmill or drive to work and listen to my esoteric blog posts in robot-podcast-voice form.  Please give me your thoughts by email or we can  chat about it in chat here: https://spectrum.chat/voice-interfaces

As foreshadowed in the note above, Spectrum is a social network for group chat, I made one on voice interfaces. Want to join? Click the link above (or this one). And we can chat about voice interfaces. Current member count: 1. I started a conversation about the article above to get people’s feedback on computer voices.

Note: not sponsored content. Just thought you’d want to know it exists. But come to think of it, LMK if you want to sponsor content. Annnyway, Opearlo is a Voice Design Agency that helps businesses create a voice channel. The Opearlo Voice Platform allows you to manage your voice apps once it’s live with analytics and content management. Thanks @peterrojas for directing me to this one. 

Programs produced by the four largest NYC-based podcasting networks saw 1.3 billion downloads in 2016, up sharply from an annual average of 199 million downloads between 2013 and 2015. Thanks @borthwick for pointing me to this.

And finally, if you don’t already listen to the New York Times Daily, you should. You can subscribe on a podcast app or just go to nytimes.com mobile web and press play. You’re welcome in advance.