A: AOL has discontinued their AOLbyPhone service, which read your email out loud to you via a phone service similar to voice mail. 

Speaking Email provides this service and is lower cost than AOLbyPhone.

We do not offer the ability to reply by taking a voice recording, but instead take dictation of your reply which turns it into a proper text email rather than being attached as a WAV file. By the way, we support playing WAV file attachments, so that if you use an email system that does take voice recordings (such as voicemail or other assistive technology) we can play it to you. We also have several other features that AOLbyPhone lacked, such as attachment speaking, disclaimer and signature skipping, reply thread skipping.

We have had AOL by Phone users switch over to Speaking Email and be very happy with the change. You can use your existing AOL account and easily compare the difference.

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 - using voice commands or on-screen buttons. It works with Microsoft 365 (aka Office, Outlook) and Gmail email accounts, as well as most other providers including any standard IMAP server.

Who is it for?

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 to work. People with blindness, vision problems, or other disabilities who cannot see or type and want to be able to hear, reply to, and compose emails by voice. 

Does it work on Apple CarPlay?

See our other product Speaking Email CarPlay if you have CarPlay.

Is is free?

Yes it is free to download the basic edition. Free features: 

• Email text-to-speech (TTS) with smart content detection (this is awesome, you will be blown away!)
• On-screen buttons for basic actions next/prev, archive, flag

Do I have to upgrade?

Nope, but you can upgrade for: 

• Multiple accounts
• Attachment reading
• Voice commands (you will love this!)
• Dictation - reply/forward/compose (you will love this even more!)