I was hooked on using Verizon’s Message+ app for texting for the longest time, until recently. The primary feature that kept me using it was its “Speak your text messages” option. I found this very handy, and I couldn’t find a better texting app that did this, so I stayed with it. Then I read an article online about apps that will read your texts and notifications to you, and everything changed. I realized how great it would be if not only my TEXTS were read to me automatically, but what if my Ring and Home alerts could be read to me as well?! That would be amazing.

So right away I set out to take a new look at texting apps. There were a few that had many more features, scored great in reviews, and had some great options that Message+ didn’t have, so I started trying them out, just for a change. I settled on an old favorite – ChompSMS. Tons of customization options and I liked almost everything about it when I used it years ago. Now on to Notification Speech.

I recently found a nice Android app called “Speaki” that allows me to have my phone speak my notifications. This means when there is motion on any of my Ring cameras or an alarm from any of my smart devices at home, instead of my phone just making whatever notification tone I have for that alarm type, it will actually TELL me what the alert is.

It can also read you text messages out loud when they come in. Everything is optional too–it’s based on which apps you choose to have talk. Only those apps will speak their notifications. As a result of this, I have changed all other notification sounds on my phone to Silent, or have turned them off completely. Now my phone is mostly quiet until there’s an alert I want to know about, then it tells me exactly what it is so I no longer have to pickup and check my notifications every time I hear a generic tone.

It works really good once you tweak it a bit. It has an “All Apps Name” option turned on by default, which speaks only the name of the app that you receive a notification for, just so you know, then it speaks further details for the apps you specify. I found this annoying so I turned it off so I only get speech for the apps I specifically selected. Everything else can wait until I have time to check my notifications.

It can be a tricky process getting it to work 100% though. There are a ton of notification options, both global and on a per-app basis in Android, so you have to take the time to experiment with exactly what works best for your specific device. I found that I needed to set the “Audio Stream” option in Speaki to “Notification”, so it uses that stream to play the speech, then turn OFF all the options in android to for Notifications – both the default sound and the notification sound for the specific apps that I want to talk. Setting the notification sound to “Silent” works as well.

I tried several other apps that speak your notifications as well, and they all approached it differently with different options. Some just turned all speech on and off for every notification you get without any options for choosing which apps – it was either ALL or NOTHING. Those I uninstalled right away and moved on. This one, so far, seems to give the perfect balance of ease of use while still having decent options for specifying only the few apps you want to speak.