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Listen to Twitter with The Social Radio

Jonathan Riggall

Jonathan Riggall

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The Social Radio for Twitter lets you listen to your Twitter feed, using your music collection as the soundtrack. It’s free for a limited time, so it’s a great time to check out this curious app. It’s now available for iOS as well as Android.

How it works

The Social Radio for Twitter uses one of your music apps as a basis for your radio station. So, not only will it use the iOS music app, but also any other music app you have installed if you want. Spotify and Soundcloud are supported, and a host of others.

You can choose what music is played from your library, though by default The Social Radio for Twitter shuffles through your most played songs, which is a good choice. The music is then interrupted by a jingle, which is followed by a male or female voice reading out tweets as they come into your timeline. The quality of the text-to-voice is pretty good, but as you’d expect, the intonation can be strange at times.

The Social Radio supports different languages. I found the detection was good, meaning English tweets were pronounced correctly, and so were Spanish. Emoticons are always described, and the apps tell you where links have been posted from. Of course you can’t follow those links – for that you’ll have to open your Twitter app.

What I think

If you have a really busy Twitter feed, The Social Radio for Twitter could be pretty overwhelming, but you can filter what is read out in settings. The voice takes a while to get used to, but I found after a while I had no trouble understanding what was happening. The use of a jingle really makes it sound like a bizarre radio station!

On iOS, which I have been testing, The Social Radio for Twitter runs fine in the background which makes it a credible radio app to use.

The text to speech voices can add unintentional humor to some tweets, and it’s not a bad way to stop yourself from checking Twitter constantly. I found I only opened Twitter when I heard about a link I wanted to read, meaning I was more focused on what I was working on.

Just a note to the developer of The Social Radio – we invented this concept back in 2009 as an April fool’s joke. The only difference between your app and Shouttr is that ours shouted at you (and was imaginary)!

Jonathan Riggall

Jonathan Riggall

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