News Corp Australia has introduced a text-to-speech audio function across its major news brands, offering audiences a new way to engage with its content.
The text-to-speech voices are from the company’s newsrooms, with the voices of journalists produced with the help of AI to represent their brands. News Corp Australia worked with specialist text-to-speech media company BeyondWords to produce the voice models.
The ‘Listen to this article’ function is now available across both web and app on brands including The Australian, news.com.au, The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, The Courier-Mail and The Advertiser, as well as The Mercury, NT News, Cairns Post, Gold Coast Bulletin, Toowoomba Chronicle, Townsville Bulletin, Geelong Advertiser, The Weekly Times and CODE Sports.
The AI-powered technology will be enabled across thousands of articles a week, allowing people to listen to the majority of articles in the categories of news, sport, business, entertainment, opinion, health, education and more.
“We are always looking for new ways for audiences to consume our content. The ability to use AI technology to offer brand-specific voices of journalists – which sound remarkably realistic – and automatically enable audio for thousands of our articles will change how our audience connects with our content,” News Corp Australia’s director of newsroom innovation, Rod Savage said.
“After a successful, smaller-scale trial for the past year on The Australian, we’re looking forward to learning what our broader audience thinks. We believe our vision for future functions and upgrades is truly compelling and will excite our audience,” Savage added.
The hyper-realistic voices allow people to read along, or if they are on mobile devices, to navigate away from an article and still be able to listen to the article on the go. Users can also set their reading speed and skip forward and backward by paragraph instead of time, making it easier to navigate through articles.
