Secretary is a Cydia tweak that will read messages and missed notifications to you, essentially acting as your personal secretary. The way the tweak works is, as soon as you plug in your BT headset/car cit or wired headphones, Secretary will read you the number of missed calls, unread messages (including their content) and calendar notifications. In addition to all of this Secretary can also read out the name of someone who just sent you a message as well as the message’s content.
Both normal SMS and iMessages are supported and Secretary can speak in all Text-toSpeech supported languages. An example of something you would hear when you connect your headset could include “You have some notifications: Missed calls: three, unread messages: one, calendar events: two.”
There is a ton of settings that you can play around with in the Secretary tab in the Settings app that you will see once the tweak has been installed that includes what to report on, whether to read only the sender or the content of a message as well when you receive a new SMS or iMessage and much more.
All-in-all Secretary is a pretty cool tweak! I do wish there was a way to read out the actual notifications without having to have a headset connected. I could imagine an option where you could specific times when Secretary could alert you of missed notifications, but maybe this will come in a future update. Other than that having the ability to have your device read out messages is a nice feature.
Secretary costs $1.99 from the BigBoss repo and at this point, unless you constantly connect your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad through Bluetooth it may not be the best bang for your buck. I am sure there will be those that would indeed benefit from this functionality though.
Make sure you check out our video review below and share your thoughts in the comments.
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