Winston, Siri’s Little Brother, Launches In App Store To Give You The Morning Scoop

You may remember Winston from its private beta launch back in August, but the DreamIt Ventures-backed startup is ready to officially launch its digital assistant app in the App Store.

Winston is a bit like Siri, in that a smart digital voice gives you information direct from your smartphone. However, unlike Siri, Winston doesn’t listen. He just talks. (Typical man.)

The idea is that the Winston app can give you a morning briefing of everything that’s important to you while you go about your routine. You can choose to watch Winston as he does his thing, showing you pictures of status updates, tweets, and news items.

Winston wakes you up with a “Good Morning, Jordan,” and dives straight into the weather forecast in your area. Then it moves on to the important posts on your social feed, keeping you in the loop with what your friends are up to.

After that, Winston starts in on the popular news stories at the moment, both on a local level and a worldwide level. It even parses some news based on categories, like Technology and Business.

I’ve been playing with the app for a few days, and I can safely say that it’s pretty impressive. Winston has a bit of trouble figuring out how to recap social networking posts.

For example, a status update from an old high school friend mentioned how excited she was to see her relatives for dinner. Winston explained that she was looking forward to “the necessary groceries,” which was what he believed to be the important part of that update.

Still, Winston’s ability to translate a number of headlines into speech for me is incredibly useful.

Throughout the briefing, users can skip ahead, swipe to go back to the last item, pause, or just get back out to the homescreen. On the homescreen of the app, all the individual sources, such as Twitter or Tech News, have their very own briefing.

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