Umano

» see umano.me as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Umano paid people to read the internet out loud. Voice actors in home studios around the United States logged into a queue of articles and recorded them. The audio came back to Umano's servers and went out to the apps. A few hours later somebody on a train pressed play and heard a professional voice read a piece from that morning.

The company was SoThree Inc. in San Francisco, built by University of Waterloo graduates who had interned at the big American tech firms first. Anton Lopyrev and Prabhdeep Gill started it alongside Ian Mendiola, who ran it as chief executive. The iPhone app arrived in October 2012 and Android followed on 21 January 2013. An editorial team picked around twenty articles a day, which was small enough to keep the recordings consistently good. By July 2013 the company was counting more than seven million article listens, and a $1 million seed round led by Birchmere Ventures and Digital Garage had closed.

On 12 May 2015 the article grid at umano.me was replaced by a letter. "We're thrilled to announce that the Umano team has joined Dropbox," it said, signed by the Umano Team, thanking a community it described as nearly three years old. The letter gave no closing date for the app. VentureBeat, writing the same day, had the number that mattered: Umano would keep running for thirty more days, until 12 June 2015, and annual subscribers had exactly that long to ask for the unused part of their money back.

Dropbox was not buying an audio product. It was buying the engineering team, and it said so in the way acquirers always do, by promising to help people get more done together and then never mentioning the app again. Dropbox never said what it intended to do with the technology, and no narration feature has appeared in the product in the decade since.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ twenty articles a day ~

The supply side was the clever bit. Mendiola described discovering a large pool of American voice talent willing to record for small amounts of money, people who had the equipment and the training but not the steady work. Umano gave them a queue and a web app and paid per article. That bought studio-quality narration at a price text-to-speech was supposed to own.

The reading list was curated rather than infinite. Breaking News, Business, Startups, Science, Health and Fitness, For Women, Facts and History. You picked a channel and worked down it. Premium removed the limits and cost money, which is why there were refunds to process at the end. The catalog never got large, and that was deliberate, because every item in it had cost a human being twenty minutes.

~ the month after the letter ~

The archive is coarser than the press reporting here. On 20 April 2015 umano.me was still serving the real product, a sign-in box over a wall of channel names. By 18 July 2015 the same address answered with 1,829 bytes and nothing in the body but the goodbye, still dated 12 May. The same goodbye was still on that address in November 2017, twenty-nine months after the app it apologized for had stopped.

Today umano.me does not answer on any host or scheme combination, and the brand went with the domain. The farewell letter is the only document the company left, and it does not contain the date the service actually stopped. For that you need a trade-press story written the same afternoon, which is a thin place for the only hard fact about a product's death to live.

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