A year ago, Pocket users got something of a treat as the company rolled out Pocket Listen, a service that allowed users to better access Pocket lists while moving. Pocket Listen was an exciting new technology at the time that allowed users to better enjoy articles by using text-to-speech functions to turn the written word into spoken language. Pocket Listen is getting some very heavy user numbers, and it's only getting better thanks to a new connection to Samsung Galaxy Gear.

With Pocket Listen, users are getting in on over 25,000 articles every week, and the stories increasing about 2.5 times in length thanks to the use of Listen, it's clear that this is a big service that a lot of users are getting behind. But now, thanks to the arrival of Pocket on Samsung (News - Alert) Galaxy Gear, all those articles and the like can be accessed and listened to from a wrist-mounted control, meaning users will never even have to touch a phone in order to get access to all that content.

Using Pocket Listen on Samsung Galaxy Gear comes with several simple controls for ease of use, including the ability to skip among articles, to pause articles in progress, to control the speed at which the text-to-speech function reads the words, and a display that shows in what language the article was written.

Pocket in general has been hard at work bringing its services out to more devices, and recently announced that it would be arriving for Kobo e-readers and tablets alike. But Pocket Listen on Samsung Galaxy Gear is a little something special, as it's a wearable device that stays out in the open, as easily accessible as a wristwatch. That's making it a lot easier for people to access content, and something like audio files especially so. Pocket Listen on the Samsung Galaxy Gear is offering what amounts to a whole new way to access content that wouldn't ordinarily have worked so well with wearable technology, by converting text into speech. Instead of squinting through an article rendered in tiny print on a wrist-mounted display, users now get the article presented as audio, which works great on this kind of format.

Pocket's advances should be a welcome development for all its users, and for those who would be using Pocket Listen if it were available on a certain device of choice. But this particular development isn't just good for Pocket; it's also good for wearable technology as a whole. The more useful wearable technology can be, the more likely people are to make it a part of everyday life. Having something like Pocket around to not only serve a useful purpose but make reading more accessible is the kind of thing that's hard to pass up.