Keep 3.0 — Introducing Text to Speech for Saved Articles
There’s been some pretty big changes to Keep over the past couple of months. Arguably the most interesting change in the app is the ability to convert your saved articles, news stories, blog posts and more into audio that you can listen to anytime, even while offline! Don’t have time to read that long story, then listen to it on your walk to work instead…
Audio Playback for Saved Articles
Keep leverages Google’s Text To Speech API to to create natural sounding audio from your saved links that you can play right from the app:
The Keep audio player has the basic scrubbing feature, playback speed options, and it will automatically save your paused location if you dismiss the audio player, so you can pick up listening right where you left off.
There’s support for multiple playback voices (both male and female) and audio playback even works while you’re offline.
Apple Sign In
Pretty self explanatory. I was pumped about Apple’s new Sign In feature announced at WWDC 2019 and I decided to make it the only way to create new accounts going forward. It’s pretty slick and fast. No more forms, confirm emails, etc. Just tap, authenticate with Touch ID / Face ID and you’re in.
Support for legacy login for existing accounts will remain, but all new accounts need to be created with your Apple ID.
As a side note, it’s interesting to see the split of new users who choose to obfuscate their real email addresses using Apple’s Private Relay service. An unscientific glance at new signups show around 60% — 70% of new users rely on private relay. Apple made a good bet with this feature!
Improved Smart Tagging
When I first introduced Smart Tagging, it was so-so. The natural language API I relied on sometimes made good classifications and appropriately tagged new saved content but it more often than not got it quite wrong, often in embarrassing ways.
Keep now uses Google’s Natural Language API for content classification and this feature is now pretty useful (in my mind). I find the automatically generated Smart Tags to be pretty helpful in organizing the links I save into Keep.
Here’s a pretty good example. The story “Think young people are hostile to capitalism now? Just wait for the next recession” is appropriately tagged with “Economics”.
Personally, I’m pretty happy with the updated Smart Tagging feature. Given that it’s powered by Google’s Natural Language API, it probably doesn’t get any more accurate than this.
Discover New Content
Finding new content is easy. We’re overwhelmed by content everyday. Finding excellent new content is time consuming. So I’ve introduced a Discover tab into the app with curated articles. No machine learning here. Just hand curated stuff that’s interesting:
Those are the big changes in Keep 3.0. There’s been lots of little performance and stability improvements, a slight refresh of the layout, icons, and such. And then there’s the ads :(
Making any money from an independent app is hard. I’ve had to introduce ads into the free accounts which can be removed with a Premium subscription. Keep Premium also includes Smart Tagging and audio articles with custom voice playback options.
Hope you enjoy the changes and if you’re new to Keep, I hope you like it.
