Listening to news articles: a new way to start your day efficiently
Isn’t it quite a hassle to take time to read news articles every day? What if you can read the morning papers while running your morning errand, and even from your favourite news publishers?
Noa, provided by an Irish startup, is a service that allows you to listen to the audio narration of news articles.
Noa stands for “News Over Audio” and was founded in 2015; it allows users to listen to articles from major publishers like Bloomberg, Financial Times, London Independent, and Irish Times like a podcast.
After publishing audio content on the coronavirus in late January 2020, the number of listeners grew to over 40,000 by March of the same year. It was driven by the Irish government’s recommendation to refer to reliable sources at a time when there was a lot of uncertain information about the corona.
One of Noa’s features is that audio articles are curated into topic-specific playlists, allowing users to watch a collection of articles on different subjects at the touch of a play button. For example, the playlists range from current events, such as Google’s dismissal of an AI researcher or Trump’s comments after the election, to “MIT Review in 2020” specials.
In a 2018 article, Noa is said to utilize text-to-speech. Currently, it emphasizes the importance of contents to be read aloud by humans and creates about 14,000 audio content. Two-thirds of Noa’s audience is between the ages of 18 and 40, and 85% are based outside of Ireland. Noa is compatible with Alexa and can respond to commands such as “Alexa, play the New York Times on Noa”.
A premium account starts at ¥9.90/month. Premium accounts allow you to remove the viewing limit, remove ads, and access content from 15 publishers.
The startup has raised about 800,000 Euros so far on Noa, and CEO Hickey states they plan to raise 5–10 million Euros in a Series A funding round by March 2021.
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