Speaking Email CarPlay News

Latest news for Speaking Email CarPlay


20 Jun 2025

Outlook Focused Inbox

For fans of Outlook Focused Inbox, you can now choose whether to use Microsoft’s AI-powered Focused Inbox feature by enabling it under Account Settings in Speaking Email. When turned on, only emails from your Focused tab will be read aloud in your car — so you can you focus on what's important during your everyday commute, and review your 'other' tab occasionally your desk.


1 Feb 2025

Favourites & Groups

You can now set up groups under Preferences > Favourites & Groups, give them a nickname, and simply say “group” when prompted for recipients while composing an email. This makes it easy to send to multiple people at once. 


10 Mar 2024

New Voice Tab

We've added another tab to the CarPlay UI - we now have Menu, Inbox, Action, Navigate and Voice tabs.



21 May 2023

Secure Yahoo & AOL Sign In

Yahoo has approved Speaking Email to connect directly to Yahoo mail servers with secure login provided by Yahoo Sign In. Purchase our Multi Account Extra to connect any number of email accounts including Yahoo/AOL and Microsoft 365, Gmail, and IMAP.


New next/back navigate menu

Most vehicles have next and previous buttons on the steering wheel. But some don't have them and sometimes they don't work. We've added a new menu on the CarPlay screen with email navigation including repeat, next, previous, skip forward, and rewind buttons. 


13 Apr 2023

AI OCR text extraction from scanned PDF attachments

Most PDF documents have a text-track embedded, which is how we normally get the text out of PDF attachments to read them out to you. Some PDFs don't have this text-track, which is the case when the original source is an image for example. Speaking Email now uses OCR (optical character recognition) based on Tesseract 4, an AI-powered text recognition system which includes multilingual language models. Note that this is run on our servers, not involving any external providers, so your data remains private within Speaking Email's infrastructure.


2 Aug 2022

We just released a new version of Speaking Email CP on the App Store. 


10 Aug 2020

Voice Commands and Sending extra feature packs are now released. There's a slight gotcha with Apple CarPlay and voice recognition: you have to have the phone active in the foreground to activate the system voice recognition. This is not too much of a problem if you know about it, and we have included prompting to let you know if the phone is in the background. 


18 Apr 2020

In the middle of lockdown here, a great opportunity to get work done. We've got new optional extra paid features available now including Multiple Accounts and Attachments. We are testing Voice Commands and Sending. 


14 Jan 2020

Speaking Email CarPlay first update

We are not findable on Google yet so we are still pretty much incognito. Now supports Gmail, Office 365 online (work/school and personal accounts), Exchange ActiveSync on premise, Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (aka Intune), Outlook.com/Hotmail (via Office 365 personal accounts).


12 Dec 2019

Speaking Email CarPlay goes live on the App Store

Apple has given us the green light to build Speaking Email for their CarPlay platform. Today, we released it on the down low for free.



Speaking Email news summary

This news is from our original product, Speaking Email, which did not have CarPlay support but formed the foundation for development of Speaking Email CarPlay. 


2018

Speaking Email "highly recommended" by Marc Saltzman in USA TODAY

USA's largest newspaper USA TODAY publishes a tech column by Marc Saltzman. Read his review of how to hear messages hands-free in the car. 

Read on ABC 13NewsNow→


2017

Speaking Email partners with Bosch to provide email in cars: launch at CES in Las Vegas

Bosch is incorporating Speaking Email into their mySPIN platform, which enables drivers to use authorised apps on their iPhone or Android smartphone via a touchscreen integrated into cars and motorbikes. 

Read on Computerworld (via web archive)→


2015 

'Hi, this is your email calling ... Drive safely' - New Zealand Herald on Sunday 

Kiwi app lets motorists listen to emails as they drive. A Kiwi company has developed an app that allows drivers to listen to emails at the wheel. Beweb created the free Speaking Email app after director Mike Nelson got frustrated at being unable to safely read emails on his commute from Auckland's North Shore to the city. 


Read more on NZ Herald→


2015

Email-reading app for drivers - Australian Associated Press

(Printed in The AustralianDaily TelegraphCourier MailSBSHerald Sun)

A New Zealand company has developed a phone app which it hopes will reduce drivers' phone distraction by reading out emails ... beweb's first app is Speaking Email, designed after director Mike Nelson said he couldn't find one to help him on his daily commute from Auckland's North Shore. With police cracking down on drivers illegally using their mobile phones, he says more such apps should be designed for driving.

Read more on The Australian→ 



More in the news

  • Gizmodo: How to make your phone read everything on screen out loud
  • Finalist in NZ Hi-Tech Awards
  • TV3, Computerworld, FutureFive: Speaking Email partners with Bosch to provide email in cars
  • Radio NZ: Innovator of the Week
  • TV3: Beweb email-reading app trumps 'pretty crap' apps
  • Breakfast TV with Paul Henry
  • NZ Herald
  • Idealog magazine


Read more news on Speaking Email website→





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