Instapaper iOS 8.3: CarPlay, Text-to-Speech Improvements, and more

Today, we launched Instapaper iOS 8.3 on the App Store. This release features a new CarPlay app for playing articles, a number of text-to-speech improvements including access to more voices, the ability to edit article metadata, and other improvements.

CarPlay

With the Instapaper CarPlay app, it’s now easier than ever to listen to your articles while driving. The CarPlay app offers easy access to your entire Instapaper account, including your saved articles in Home, Liked, Archived, and Folders.

To start listening to an article, just select one from the list.

When an article is playing, you can easily rewind, fast forward, adjust playback speed, and like or archive the article.

Anyone can use the CarPlay app to play one article at a time. With Instapaper Premium, selecting an article in CarPlay will automatically create a Playlist that allows you to listen to your articles one after the other.

Additionally, Premium customers can use the Instapaper app to create a custom playlist by going to the More button in an article list, selecting Playlist, and choosing articles to play. The CarPlay app will automatically detect custom Playlists, and you can access the Playlist from the top right of the Now Playing screen on CarPlay.

We’re offering a free month of Instapaper Premium through May if you’d like to trial playlist functionality and other Premium features.

Selecting Voices

Previously, Instapaper used the default text-to-speech voice for the language of the article. In Instapaper 8.3, we now offer the ability to select from multiple text-to-speech voices. You can select voices in Instapaper Settings > Voices.

Instapaper will continue to automatically detect the language of the article and use the selected voice for that language. The selected voice will also be used for listening to articles with CarPlay.

You can download additional high quality voices by going to iOS Settings > Accessibility > Speech > Voices. We recommend the high quality Alex voice for English.

Editing Articles

In this release, we are adding the ability to edit article titles and descriptions directly in iOS. This can be helpful for adjusting the title/description or adding your own context to the article.

You can modify article titles and descriptions by swiping an article in the list, pressing the Share icon, and then tapping Edit.

Deprecating Connected Accounts on Mobile

We are deprecating the ability to link connected accounts (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, etc) on iOS in order to reduce maintenance overhead. You can still link your connected accounts in your Instapaper Settings on web. Additionally, Instapaper will still support automatically posting liked articles and notes to your connected accounts regardless of which platform you use.

Thanks for writing in with your feature requests and bug reports. We really appreciate hearing from you and your requests inform our roadmap. If you have any feature requests, questions, and/or issues, please let us know via email at support@help.instapaper.com or via @InstapaperHelp on Twitter.