Freebie alert: Voice Brief reads aloud your feeds on iDevice in the background (and it sounds great)

Now, here’s an app worth five minutes of your time. If you’re overwhelmed with information (hands up who isn’t – thought so), Voice Brief will capture your precious feeds from many different places and read them aloud for you. Staying on top of things is a breeze with this nifty app, but you must act fast because it’s free only for a couple of hours.

Voice quality is a bit better and slightly less robotic than standard iOS text-to-speech because Voice Brief packs in a huge database of high-quality samples. Voice synthesis happens directly on the device rather than in the cloud so you can use the program in offline mode.

There are four different voices to read aloud your stock quotes, RSS news feeds, weather information, Facebook status updates, tweets, Gmail messages and custom sentences. The program is smart enough to switch between voices based on content at hand. For example, status updates and news feeds are rendered in an upbeat reporter voice.

Voice Brief plays nice with third-party Bluetooth headsets and remote controls and runs in the background so  you can stay on top of things while surfing the web, driving a car, brushing your teeth and so forth. In fact, Voice Brief saving you the hassle of switching between a bunch of apps just to keep tabs on the stuff that interests you.

The lack of Google Reader support could be a deal-breaker for some, however. Voice Brief is a 235MB download due to the built-in database and it’s only free until 5pm today. Note: if you’re experiencing issues with Facebook Connect, enable HTTPS in your Facebook security settings on the web. For a demo video, head over to the official Voice Brief site.