Pocket, the leading app for saving articles to read later, has a new voice, the voice of Amazon Polly. And it’s good enough that you just might actually want to use it.

Android: Google has some pretty powerful text-to-speech on Android. For most people, the default settings are fine. However, if you've ever wanted to slow down or tweak the voice, you can do that in some buried settings.

Writing is tricky. It can be tough to find the right sequence of words to convey your thoughts and ideas. A sentence might make sense as you type it out, but reading it out loud can be a different story. To improve your writing, make sure it sounds good when read aloud.

Whether you're driving or you just want to be hands-free around the house, you can make your iOS device read anything from emails to websites to articles, and all it takes is turning on an Accessibility function.

Recently I'm in the necessity of reading a lot of stuff and sometimes I don't have enough time due to other tasks (exercising, making lunch, etc.) I would love to try a text-to-speech app (for iOS preferably) and see the results. Which is the best (non-robotic) text to speech app for this matter?

Google has released its text-to-speech engine to the Play Store, which means you can now download it on any supported device. The primary benefit is that if you weren't particularly fond of the robotic-sounding voice on devices like Samsung's Galaxy lineup, you can install and replace the default engine.

Getting distracted by your phone while behind the wheel is bad, but darn it if your phone isn't tempting you with that notification. Find out who's trying to get your attention with Botifier.

Web/iOS: If your feed reader never seems to drop below 1000+ unread items, it's probably because you're reading with just your eyes. SoundGecko -- the brainchild of three guys based in Melbourne -- uses text-to-speech to let you read online articles with your ears. And its iOS app has just been updated with a big list of new features, including a freshened-up interface, categorised stations and push notifications.

Mac: My roommate recently lost her voice, which has been challenging since we talk a lot to each other. We came up with a solution to get her Mac to talk for her. This is easy enough if you just use the TextEdit app included with OS X, but there are a couple of more convenient solutions.

Android: Text to speech is a great thing, especially when you're working or driving. But you would probably be OK with just text messages or emails being spoken aloud instead of every notification that comes in. SpeakMe gives you that level of control.

Android: Pocket, one of our favourite bookmark-and-read-later apps, just updated with a "Listen" feature that reads your saved articles out loud to you.

SoundGecko is a new web app that's essentially a text-to-speech transcription service. Drop a URL into SoundGecko and it converts the article into speech. On top of that, it integrates with cloud services and an iPhone app.

The web provides tons of great written content, but that can get a little overwhelming when you're not in the mood to read all day long. Announcify is a browser extension for those times when you'd rather just listen. All you have to do is browse to any article and click the Announcify button.

Music or TV is great to play in the background while you do other things, but what if you have articles you want to read instead? Reader Steve shows us how to make OS X read to you with a keyboard shortcut.

Windows: Balabolka is a free application that supercharges text-to-speech in Windows. You can alter voices, pitch, cadence and speed, import popular text formats, and export the generated audio to popular audio formats.

If you or someone you know would like to make Android's walking navigation more friendly to those without the requirement of a screen, Google released two apps last week that make it so.

All browsers: The free JISC TechDis bookmarklet and user script does something long overdue for web users. It creates a toolbar that makes text bigger, changes its font, reads it out loud, spell checks it and even pulls its references.

Windows only: Professional writers often read their work out loud to make sure it flows well and sounds coherent. If want to kick back and have the reading done for you, then give Speak Clipboard a try.

You need a quick text to speech conversion but you're lacking the software to do so. No worries, Zamzar—the handy online file conversion tool—has added text to speech conversion.