How to Easily Convert Your Written Articles into Audio Articles
Journalism thrives on accessibility. Print and computer screens have great advantages: computers are closing in on being able to communicate information at the speed of light. However, if the only option is text, that gives some communities a significant disadvantage. But thanks to some new tools, journalists can supplement their text work with audio very easily.
Both Google’s TTS API and Amazon’s Polly API are cloud-based text-to-speech converters that are used by newsrooms with more resources, such as The Washington Post and TheWall Street Journal. And while these are the most sophisticated systems, they aren’t in reach for most freelance journalists. Thankfully, as is the way with technology, as time goes on, intermediaries show up to fill in the gaps.
BeyondWords, one such intermediary, has a lot of capability for a service with a “free” option. The tool is capable of generating text-to-speech with 700+ AI voices across 64 languages. The initial setup is simple, and the “free” option allows you to do more with the audio article after you’ve generated it: you can turn the article into an RSS feed or even into a podcast.
Trinity Audio is another app that is extremely easy to use and will get your text converted to speech quickly. Trinity also offers a free version, available in these languages.
Medium uses a service called Speechify, and The Verve uses an app called Remixd. All of these text-to-speech services occupy the same function for varying prices, and are great for producing an audio addition to any article you’ve drafted online.
Then there are some newer technologies with bigger ambitions. For example, Murf. Murf has a number of options for AI voices that are not just based on language or accent. For instance, the website lists Product Developer, Educator, Marketer, Author, Corporate Coach, Podcaster, Animator, and Customer Support as available “voice” options. Murf can also sync high quality generated AI to video, leading to more options for media and accessibility aids for a journalist’s online material. This technology comes at a price, but a very handicapped “free” plan is available.
Journalists should keep their eyes on AI developments as they become available—AI could be a valuable resource for accessibility, for data gathering, and for organizing. However, humans aren’t completely out of style: Journalist David Tvrdon says “of course, using professionals or your own authors to read the articles still remains the best experience in the sense you can hear it is done by a human, especially with longer texts.” However, he notes that AI technology was starting to catch up to that too, writing:
“I did a test with my family and played them a clip of a human reading a text and a neural version of an AI voice reading a text. They couldn’t tell if one of them wasn’t human. Yes, scary….Sounds Profitable, the ad tech weekly newsletter from Podnews, was able to synthesize the voice (create [a] clone) of the newsletter host Bryan Barletta and then use it to speak a language he doesn’t speak.”
The possibilities are great for journalists and newsrooms who can harness this technology to aid their journalistic process and make their pieces more accessible to their communities. Once you’ve latched onto one of these tools and decide how to apply it, you can create the future of journalism one day at a time.
