Narrativ

Narrativ, listed on the App Store as Narrativ.ai, is an iPhone app for listening to the news. Narrativ partners with publishers across several domains and turns their written articles into narrated audio using cloned voices. Listeners stream the latest news story by story until they are up to date on local, state, national or international events. It is aimed at people who prefer to hear news articles rather than read them.

During onboarding, the listener selects favourite publishers and news categories, which shapes a tailored audio feed from the first day. The Play All button builds a playlist of stories that can be filtered by publication date, source or category before listening starts. An article preview shows a snippet of an article's text so the listener can decide whether to play it, and notifications point to the most popular audio articles.

Narrativ is free and has no listed in-app purchases. Version 1.2 brought an updated interface, the reworked Play All feature, article previews and fixes for publisher-category following and incorrect audio lengths. Narrativ runs only on iPhone and requires iOS 12.0 or later; it also runs on Macs with an Apple M1 chip or later and on Apple Vision. The app is in English and is rated 13+.

Use cases

• Listening to the day's news as narrated audio instead of reading articles
• Catching up on local, state, national or international news one story at a time
• Building a news playlist from chosen sources and categories