Q: Outlook Play My Emails vs Speaking Email - which is best?
A: "Play My Emails" is a new Microsoft Cortana feature in Outlook for iOS. Both apps play your email inbox out loud, enabling you to archive, flag, and reply to emails.
Just like Speaking Email, Outlook Play My Emails integrates directly with Office 365, Outlook.com, Hotmail and Gmail accounts meaning your email is always in sync.
But it's not quite as full featured as Speaking Email which provides the following additional features over Outlook "Play My Emails":
- forward and compose to contacts
- simple reply editing, such as "replace word" voice command
- intelligently strips out clutter such as email signatures
- multilingual email detection automatically switches voices to read in native language (Outlook Play My Emails only supports English US)
- ability to choose reading voice
- choice of trigger points for activating voice commands hands free
Most importantly, it is about the experience. Which one has the nicest, smoothest, fastest, least cluttered and most focussed reading and command experience?
Speaking Email also supports secure enterprise email access through Microsoft Intune and on-premises Exchange (as a Microsoft product you might assume Outlook would support these but in fact Speaking Email has better support for these enterprise level Microsoft technologies).
Are we worried? Yes and no. We welcome this competition which we expect will propel market growth in email text-to-speech. It should get more people thinking about email text-to-speech and trying Speaking Email vs Outlook Play My Emails.
We hope to position our app in the top end of this growing market as users recognize Speaking Email as the best way to play their emails. While Outlook enables general "productivity", we go further to focus on two primary use cases - visually impaired users and safe driving.
We also hope that there's still room for little startups like Speaking Email now that the Microsoft gorilla has entered the fray. We count on support from our thousands of enthusiastic users to recommend Speaking Email to friends.
See Geekwire review of Outlook Play My Emails by @toddbishop
What is Speaking Email?
An app for iPhone and Android that reads your email out loud to you. It intelligently extracts content from emails (minus the signatures, disclaimers and threads). And it lets you action your email - archive, mark-as-read, trash, flag, reply, or forward. It can be completely by voice command, or use the large on-screen buttons or full screen touch gestures.
Who is it for?
People with blindness or visual impairment. People who are busy and run out of time to get through their inbox. People who want to make productive use of time when driving between appointments.
Do you have Apple CarPlay?
See our other product Speaking Email CarPlay.
