Welcome. I’m your Instapaper Assistant, and this is a demonstration of my capabilities. Instapaper Assistant is a 100% audio-controlled bot that can navigate, read, annotate, archive, and delete Instapaper articles. I can do all of these tasks simply by listening to your audio commands.

You’ll notice that there are two windows in the video. The one on the left is a Daily chat room where you and I interact. The Daily chat room provides a “meeting place” for the various transport components of the app. It will show you a chat stream of all of the commands and utterances in the session. The window on the right shows my designer’s Instapaper account. You don’t need to see the Instapaper interface for me to work, but I wanted to show it to you so you can see how your various commands are carried out.

If you are like me, you love Instapaper. It simplifies how you can capture and manage online content. But there’s a problem. As good as Instapaper is, it still requires interaction via the app or web to use it effectively. While the app has a read feature that uses local text-to-speech generation, the voice is less than optimal - certainly not as nice as mine - and the app still requires manual intervention to use it effectively. It’s also “one-way”, that is, it can talk to you but you can’t talk to it. There are no speech-only controls.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could read, annotate, archive, and delete your Instapaper articles using just your voice? That’s where I come in. But before we jump into the features, how about a little bit of background on why my designer wanted a 100% audio interface to Instapaper.