Umano brings the sweet, dulcet tones of a VentureBeat story right to your ears

Some days, you might prefer to listen to the news, instead of reading it.

That’s why we’ve teamed up with Umano to integrate its text-to-audio technology into our article pages.

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Umano’s service translates written articles into audio reports read by the startup’s team of professional narrators. The translated content can be consumed by those who have vision problems, or just prefer to hear their news instead of reading it. You can access these audio translations directly from the article page by clicking the orange circular headphones button located within the row of social sharing tools at the top of the page.

Right now, Umano is publishing audio versions of only a handful of our stories (the most popular ones). If there’s no headphones button, there’s no audio version yet. We hope to increase the number of audio stories as time goes by.

Additionally, Umano is rolling out an update to its service that brings new content discovery features to narrated articles. If you’ve got the Umano app, you will see a new home feed that contains recommended content and the ability to subscribe to content channels (aka genres or news categories). Recommendations are based on which channels you subscribe to, your listening patterns, and friend activity.

Umano’s update also brings a refreshed user interface, and a new features that let you explore all the available content as well as discuss that content with the overall community.

Umano’s app updates roll out today, while its publisher integration can initially be found on VentureBeat and MIT Technology review. The startup said it plans to announce additional publishing partnerships in the near future.