Why listen to newsletters instead of reading them?

Most of us subscribe to more newsletters than we have time to read. They pile up, and the good ones get buried alongside promotions. Listening fixes two problems at once:

• It fits into time you already have. Commutes, workouts, and getting ready in the morning are hard to read during, but easy to listen during.
• It cuts the noise. A summary of the key stories across several newsletters is faster than opening each one.

Step 1: Connect your Gmail

Download Iris from the App Store and sign in with Google. Iris asks for read-only access to Gmail, which means it can view emails but can't send, delete, or change anything. Sign-in goes through Google's standard OAuth flow, so Iris never sees your password.

Step 2: Let Iris find your newsletters

Iris scans the headers of emails from the past 30 days — the sender, the date, and the List-Unsubscribe header that newsletters include — to find your subscriptions. It filters out personal correspondence and transactional email, and only stores the sender's name and address.

Missing one? Use Find More Newsletters to search your inbox for a specific sender.

Step 3: Pick your newsletters and set an alarm

Choose up to five newsletters for your daily episode, then set the time you want it ready. You can also pick a voice and playback speed.

Step 4: Wake up to your episode

Before your alarm, Iris builds your episode:

1. It fetches the latest issues from your selected newsletters (up to three per sender from the past seven days).
2. An AI model writes a natural, conversational script covering the key stories.
3. The script is turned into audio with AI voice synthesis.

The result is a podcast-style episode made just for you.

Beyond newsletters: articles and PDFs

Newsletters are only part of what you want to read. You can also share web articles into Iris from your phone's share sheet, and add PDFs, so everything on your reading list ends up in the same personal podcast.

What happens to your data?

Iris is designed to keep as little as possible. Email content is processed in memory to write your script and then discarded — it's never stored. Episodes are kept in private storage that only you can access and are automatically deleted after 3–14 days. You can revoke Gmail access at any time from your Google Account. For the full details, see How Iris Works and Data Security.