A Tour of Instapaper Assistant Features

Instabot 2

Welcome to the feature tour. For the purposes of this demo, my designer is displaying his Instapaper account on two different screens, so you can see fully what’s going on. Keep in mind that you don’t need to “see” Instapaper for me to work. I work solely based upon your voice commands.

I have two modes of interacting with you. First is the navigation mode. In this mode, I am working with articles at the index level, as if you were looking at your Instapaper home page. I will always read the title of the currently selected article to orient you about where you are in the index. From there, you can issue a “next” command to move to the next article or “previous” to move to the previous article. You can also issue “first” and “last” commands with an obvious result. It’s important to remember that I only work with the newest 25 articles in your account. This is a default that can be changed in my settings. My designer will demonstrate these features now, and then return here for other features.

Read Mode

Once you navigate to an article that you would like to read, you can enter read mode for that article by issuing a “read” command. I will start to read the article at a normal speed and cadence. You can pause at any time by saying, “pause”, and continuing by saying … you guessed it, “continue.” You can also fast-forward or back by speaking a forward 5 or back 5 to navigate in 5-sentence chunks.

Other Commands

While I’m reading, you can also say either “mark” or “highlight” to highlight that section of the article. This feature will highlight only one sentence at a time, so if you want to highlight a larger section, you’ll have to issue multiple commands. At any time, you can also say “stop”. This command exits read mode and returns you to the navigate mode. You can also say “archive” or “delete” from either mode with obvious effect.

That’s a fast tour of my capabilities. Please let my designer know what you think or give him feedback on how to make me better.