The short answer: Yes, and a lot of people already do. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025 puts podcasts at around 10% of news access, with 73% of podcast users saying podcasts help them understand topics more deeply, while news consumption via social video climbed from 52% in 2020 to 65% in 2025 and 44% of 18–24s now name social media as their main source of news. Listening works well for context and badly for scanning. InSnaps’ Pulse mode sits in between: auto-playing cards with an image, a typed caption and device text-to-speech narration, so you can put the phone down and still get through a session. Be clear about what that is: it’s your phone’s built-in synthetic voice reading text, not human voice actors or recorded audio journalism.
Listening is a different activity, not a lazier one
People frame audio news as reading-for-people-who-can’t-be-bothered. That’s wrong in an interesting way. Listening and reading fail at opposite things.
Reading is random-access. Your eye skips, skims, backtracks, jumps to the number in the third paragraph, and abandons the piece in two seconds if the first line is filler. That’s enormously efficient for triage.
Listening is serial. You can’t skim a voice. You get it in the order it was written, at a fixed pace, and skipping is clumsy. Terrible for triage; genuinely good at the thing reading is worst at: staying with a story long enough to absorb the context. Which is roughly what the Digital News Report 2025 finding reflects: 73% of podcast users say podcasts help them understand topics more deeply. Not “faster.” Deeper.
So the practical rule is not to replace reading with listening. Use audio for the parts of your day where reading is impossible (commuting, cooking, walking the dog, the gym) and accept that you’ll cover fewer stories more thoroughly. That’s the trade, and it’s a good one if you take it deliberately.
What the numbers actually say about how people consume news now
Worth grounding this, because the argument is usually made without numbers.
From the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025: podcasts account for roughly 10% of news access. Real, but nowhere near dominant, so anyone announcing that audio has replaced text is overselling. Meanwhile news consumption via social video rose from 52% in 2020 to 65% in 2025, and 44% of 18–24-year-olds name social media as their main source of news.
Read together, the picture isn’t “audio is winning.” It’s that the card-and-clip format is winning: short, visual, autoplaying, narrated. Pure text is losing ground fastest among the youngest readers. Audio-only podcasts are a strong but niche slice; audio attached to a visual card is the format that captured the last five years. That’s the gap products like Pulse aim at: the social-video format applied to news, without the rage-bait attached.
How Pulse works, described honestly
InSnaps’ Pulse mode plays your feed as a sequence of auto-advancing cards. Each card has an image, a caption typed onto the screen as it plays, and narration produced by your device’s text-to-speech engine: the same system-level speech synthesiser that reads your phone’s accessibility content. You can watch it, or lock the phone and just listen.
What that means in practice:
- It’s synthetic, and it sounds synthetic. Modern on-device voices are far better than they were, but this is not a presenter, not a reporter reading their own piece, and not produced audio with tape or ambience. If you love the craft of a well-made news podcast, Pulse is not that and won’t feel like it.
- It’s fast, because there’s no production step. Everything in your feed can be narrated, not just the handful of stories someone had time to record. That’s the actual advantage of TTS and the only one worth claiming.
- The speech is rendered on your device. Device text-to-speech reads the text locally rather than streaming pre-recorded audio files.
- It works hands-free. The cards advance themselves. It’s designed for the phone-down part of your day, which is where audio news is genuinely useful.
- Unlimited article audio is a Pro feature. Free is $0 and opens 13 of the 32 topic domains with a monthly swipe allowance. Pro is $2.99/month, $24.99/year (save 31%) or $149.99 lifetime and adds unlimited swipes, no ads, cross-device sync and unlimited article audio. Platforms: iOS, iPadOS, macOS, Android.
And the mix still applies here. Pulse plays whatever your feed is, so if you’ve set your locality by name and turned the local dial up, you’ll hear your town (local stories are weighted 3× in InSnaps’ ranking) rather than a wall of world news read aloud.
The four ways to listen to news, compared
| News podcasts | Radio / live audio | Screen reader on a website | Narrated news cards (InSnaps Pulse) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Voice | Human presenters, produced | Human, live | Device synthetic | Device text-to-speech |
| Coverage breadth | A few stories per episode | Whatever’s on now | Whatever page you opened | Your whole feed |
| Local to your town | Rarely | Sometimes, if a local station exists | Depends on the site | Yes, if you set a named locality |
| Hands-free | Yes | Yes | Partly — you navigate | Yes, cards auto-advance |
| Timeliness | Episode schedule | Live | Immediate | Immediate |
| Depth | Highest | Medium | As deep as the article | Card-length, with a depth control |
| Cost | Free / subscription | Free | Free | Free tier $0; unlimited audio on Pro at $2.99/mo |
Who should actually use audio news, and who shouldn’t
Use it if your reading time is genuinely constrained by your hands and eyes being busy; if you retain spoken information well; if you’d otherwise read nothing on a commute; or if reading on a screen is difficult for you for accessibility reasons. Synthetic narration was built for exactly that and it’s the least-discussed reason it’s valuable.
Skip it if you triage heavily. If your reading style is scanning twenty headlines to pick two, audio will drive you up a wall, because the whole point of scanning is skipping and audio makes skipping expensive. Also skip if you specifically want the craft: reported audio features, interview tape, an editor’s structure. A synthetic voice reading a summary is a genuinely different product and pretending otherwise is how apps lose trust.
What it won’t do
Pulse’s narration is device text-to-speech. It is not a human voice actor, not a presenter, and not recorded audio journalism, and it will not sound like one. It won’t do interviews, tape, ambience or a host’s judgement about what matters. It won’t make a long investigative piece into a listenable feature; that’s editing work, and nothing automatic does it.
Beyond audio, the honest limitations on InSnaps generally: it’s an early-stage indie app. The interface is available in 11 languages, but all news content is English-only. There’s no translation layer, and narration therefore reads English text regardless of your interface language. The free tier opens 13 of the 32 topic domains. All source counts and coverage claims are first-party, taken from InSnaps’ own store listings and site rather than an independent audit. It does not do bias comparison across sources; Ground News is better at that and it isn’t a feature InSnaps replicates. And no format, audio included, fixes the underlying supply problem where local reporting has disappeared.
FAQ
Can you listen to the news instead of reading it? Yes. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025 puts podcasts at around 10% of news access, and 73% of podcast users say podcasts help them understand topics more deeply. Audio works well for depth and context and badly for triage, since you can’t skim a voice. Most people are best served using it for commutes, chores and other eyes-busy time rather than replacing reading entirely.
What is InSnaps Pulse? Pulse is InSnaps’ hands-free mode: your feed plays as auto-advancing cards, each with an image, a caption typed on screen and narration from your device’s text-to-speech engine. You can watch it or lock the phone and listen. Unlimited article audio is part of the Pro tier.
Is InSnaps’ narration a human voice? No. It is device text-to-speech, your phone’s built-in speech synthesiser reading the text. It is not a human voice actor, a presenter, or produced audio journalism, and it does not include interview tape or ambience.
How many people get their news from audio and video now? Per the Digital News Report 2025, podcasts account for roughly 10% of news access, news consumption via social video rose from 52% in 2020 to 65% in 2025, and 44% of 18–24-year-olds name social media as their main source of news. Short, visual, narrated formats have grown much faster than audio-only ones.
Does listening cost extra in InSnaps? The free tier is $0 and includes 13 of the 32 topic domains with a monthly swipe allowance. Unlimited article audio comes with Pro at $2.99/month, $24.99/year (save 31%) or $149.99 lifetime, which also adds unlimited swipes, an ad-free feed and cross-device sync. It runs on iOS, iPadOS, macOS and Android.
Sources
- Podcasts ≈10% of news access; 73% say podcasts deepen understanding; social video news 52% (2020) → 65% (2025); 44% of 18–24s name social media as main news source: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2025
- Device text-to-speech on iOS/macOS (AVSpeechSynthesizer): https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfaudio/avspeechsynthesizer
- Device text-to-speech on Android (TextToSpeech): https://developer.android.com/reference/android/speech/tts/TextToSpeech
- InSnaps Pulse, pricing, platforms and topic domains (first-party): https://insnaps.app
- InSnaps: Local & Global News on the App Store (first-party listing): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/insnaps-local-global-news/id6762338049