At Speaking Email we realise you want to save time not waste it. That’s why we avoid reading out clutter.
But how do we do that? We’ve now got 9 ways to keep you hearing your most important emails.
1. Ignored senders
Just say “ignore” or tap the "ignore" button and the current sender will be skipped in future. It still reads out the name and then says “skipping this sender” so you are aware.
2. Skip promotional emails
Sick of listening to junk mail and newsletters? There’s a switch to turn these off. We detect promotional emails simply by looking for unsubscribe links.
3. Gmail category tabs
Promotional, social, updates and forums. If you use gmail you can switch on or off any of these gmail categorisations in account settings.
4. Signature skipping
Within emails we detect and skip over bits of irrelevant content. This includes email signatures, legal disclaimers, footers, contact details such as phone and fax blocks, long strings of digits, IDs, URLs, characters such as ———–.
5. New emails only
If you want to hear only new emails we have two switches for this, either unread only or unplayed only. The difference is “unread” uses the server status to tell if it’s been marked as read from any mail client, while unplayed is just whether Speaking Email has read it out already.
6. Reply thread cutoff
Emails often contain long threads of replies and forwards. I prefer to listen to these and then swipe next when I’ve heard enough. You may prefer we don’t read these out at all. We have a feature that looks for your name or email address within thread headers and skips the rest of the email when we have evidence this email thread has crossed your path already. This is a really nice feature for busy people listening handsfree.
7. "Block" command
Trash all email arriving from this sender with the "block" command. Just say "block" or hit the "block" button. To review or remove blocked senders, look under Preferences > Sender Rules.
8. "Important" command
Designate a sender as important by saying "important". All emails from this sender will be read out first. These can be changed later under Preferences > Sender Rules.
9. "Folder" command
You can have Speaking Email read out email in any folder, by saying "folder" to switch folders. If you like managing your email in folders on your desktop mail client, or you wish to set up rules to put important mails in a different folder, you might use Speaking Email to listen to a specific folder, for example your "to read" or "important" folders. If you are driving to a meeting you could prepare by reviewing your correspondence if you have client- or project-specific folders.
