Microsoft Outlook for Android adding ‘Play My Emails’ feature

Damien Wilde | Jul 15 2020 - 5:12 am PT

Microsoft has announced a ton of new features for Microsoft 365 that includes Outlook for Android. The latest feature is Play My Emails, which appeared on the iOS version of Outlook late last year.

A pretty self explanatory feature, Play My Emails basically gives you the ability to have Outlook read aloud your emails. This might not be useful to everyone, but when connected to Bluetooth headphones it might be a really neat time-saving — and hands-free — feature.

It’s worth noting that when connected to a Bluetooth speaker, headphones, or earbuds, you’ll see a pop-up that will let you listen to all of your incoming messages. The Play My Emails feature works by utilizing Microsoft’s Cortana voice assistant to read back the content of your message, sender details, plus the date and time it was received.

Now rolling out for Android: Catch up what’s new in your inbox and changes to your day with Play My Emails in Outlook —Triaging your inbox can take time in your day so it’s great when you can listen and respond to your email while you’re busy doing other things. Let Cortana read out your new email messages so you can listen hands-free, stay connected, and quickly learn if someone has made a change to your calendar. Learn more about it here.

You can catch a glimpse of it in action below:

Play My Emails also lets you know when things like calendar changes and events have been made or updated. This might be a powerful tool, especially if you are now following a work-from-home model due to COVID-19.

Not only is the read-aloud feature able to read your emails, though. You can join your video calls or meetings in apps like Zoom, too, plus you can set reminders or respond to emails using Cortana.

At the moment it doesn’t look as though the feature is widely available. It’s highly likely that if you use Outlook on your Android phone extensively, the Play My Emails feature will come via a server-side update.