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Stories, insights, and announcements from the BeyondWords blog—read aloud by AI. Learn how publishers are using audio and video to shape the future of digital storytelling.

  1. 5D AGO

    Outside Interactive uses BeyondWords to scale ElevenLabs voices across multiple titles

    Outside Interactive now uses BeyondWords to deliver ElevenLabs narration across multiple editorial titles, including Outside Online, Velo, and Backpacker. Once an article is published, an audio version can be generated and embedded with BeyondWords, so subscribers can listen on the move or read and listen simultaneously. Quality voices for quality journalism. After reviewing a range of AI voice providers, Outside gravitated toward ElevenLabs voices for their quality and realism. For a brand built on immersive, human-led storytelling, anything less wouldn't cut it. Rachel Risko, Lead Product Manager at Outside, explains: "Our long-form features are crafted pieces of journalism—they deserve narration that sounds natural and engaging, not robotic. ElevenLabs produces voices that can carry the emotional weight of a 5,000-word adventure narrative without listener fatigue. "When someone's on a long trail run listening to one of our stories, the voice needs to feel like a companion, not a machine." You can listen to an extract of one of Outside's audio articles below: "It's the kind of immersive, character-driven narrative that works beautifully in audio," says Risko. Adopting ElevenLabs, without the complexity. ElevenLabs set the benchmark for voice quality, but Outside knew building the surrounding infrastructure—from CMS integration to the audio player—would be complex and time-consuming. That's when they discovered BeyondWords. BeyondWords allows Outside to use ElevenLabs voices as part of an automated publishing workflow. After a simple, one-time setup of the WordPress plugin and a dedicated project for each title, audio versions are created and embedded into articles. There are no extra steps for editors, and minimal engineering overhead. So, Outside can scale ElevenLabs audio without disrupting existing workflows. Using audio to drive subscriptions. Audio plays a direct role in Outside's subscription strategy, offered as one of the many exclusive benefits to Outside+ subscribers. For non-subscribers, the BeyondWords Player displays a "Subscribe to listen" prompt. Clicking play takes readers to the sign-up page, where audio is positioned as a premium benefit. For subscribers, the audio player displays a "Listen and enjoy this subscriber-only benefit" message that reinforces exclusivity. By giving subscribers flexibility in how they consume content, Outside can foster engagement habits that increase satisfaction and reduce churn. Outside also uses audio to support its brand identity. With a mission to help people get outdoors, the company believes that time outside is transformational and essential to human health, happiness, and connection—for everyone. By turning its editorial content into a premium listening experience, this allows their audience to enjoy the stories that inspire them while on the go. "Our readers are active people—they're out hiking, running, driving to trailheads, or commuting to their next adventure. Audio lets them engage with our long-form storytelling during moments when reading isn't practical," explains Risko. "It's about meeting our audience where they are: in motion, outdoors, living the lifestyle we celebrate." Add ElevenLabs narration to your publication. Want to offer high-quality AI narration without building and maintaining an audio stack? BeyondWords lets you deploy ElevenLabs voices through a fully automated, publisher-ready workflow—across websites, apps, and feeds. Book a demo to see it in action.

    3 min

  2. FEB 12

    Audio article best practices: 11 ways to boost listener engagement

    Audio articles get more engagement when they're presented and promoted thoughtfully. In this post, we'll share audio article best practices informed by our close partnerships with leading publishers. So you can get more readers to click play—and keep listening. Here are 11 ways to boost listener engagement: 1. Choose the right voice Choosing the right voice for your audio articles reduces friction, strengthens trust, and makes the listening experience more enjoyable. So people listen for longer and come back for more. Many publishers choose AI voices because they're easy to scale and deliver a consistent listening experience across large volumes of content. These are key factors to consider when choosing an AI voice: Naturalness and clarity: The voice should sound lifelike, with smooth pacing, natural emphasis, and accurate pronunciation, so it never distracts from the story. Brand alignment: The voice should feel true to your publication's character. Consider whether the accent reflects the communities you serve and whether the voice's personality fits your newsroom. Tone and editorial fit: The delivery should suit the content. For example, a steady tone helps serious reporting feel more credible. You may want to use different voices across different categories. At BeyondWords, we curate AI voices from ElevenLabs and Azure to give you the best possible balance of quality and variety. And we can help you find the best options for your publication. That said, we recommend voice cloning above anything else. Clone your journalists' voices Cloning your journalists' voices is one of the most effective ways to make your AI audio feel authentic, distinctive, and closely aligned with your newsroom's identity. It can deepen audience connection, encouraging listeners to stay engaged for longer and return more often. If your newsroom already has recognizable voices (such as podcast hosts) cloning lets you extend the value of their voices without adding to their workload. Publishers like News Corp Australia, SPH Media, Schibsted, and La Nación have worked with BeyondWords to create Professional voice clones for their publications. 2. Customize the audio player Customizing the player is one of the simplest ways to make audio feel more integrated with your website or app and increase playback rates. If you're using the BeyondWords Player, you can choose from Small, Standard, or Large player designs. Each offers a different balance between visibility and functionality. Whatever player size you choose, update the background, icon, and text colors so they fit naturally with your light and dark mode designs. Aim for strong contrast to ensure accessibility and make the play button easy to spot. If you prefer full control over the design and behavior of your player, you can build custom interfaces using our JavaScript, iOS, and Android SDKs. 3. Position the player (and widget) strategically We recommend positioning the audio player directly above the featured image or first paragraph of your article, so it's easy for prospective listeners to discover. Also enable the BeyondWords Player widget, so users can access the player as they scroll down the page. Alternatively, build a custom solution for your website or app. 4. Enable playback-by-paragraph JFM boosted audio engagement rates tenfold after enabling BeyondWords' playback-by-paragraph feature, which lets readers click anywhere in an article to start (or stop) listening. The feature lowers the barrier to audio by making it easy to try out, while also giving readers more control over how they consume a story. Together, these benefits can increase dwell time and improve reader satisfaction. 5. Use paragraph highlighting With paragraph highlighting, the section of text being read aloud is highlighted in a color of your choice. This reduces the friction of switching between reading and listening, improves comprehension, and makes long-form articles easier to follow. Combined with playback-...

    8 min

  3. FEB 2

    Script templates: Adapt stories for video & audio—automatically

    The most engaging videos and audios start with stories tailored to the format. That's why we're introducing script templates. BeyondWords script templates automatically transform your articles into specialized video and audio scripts, adapting the length, structure, and style to match how people watch and listen. These scripts then continue through your custom workflow to generate on-brand video and audio. It's the easy, effective way to repurpose written journalism for modern audiences. Use our pre-made storytelling templates. We've pre-built a set of script templates you can use straight away. For instance: Summary converts articles into short-form scripts ideal for engaging users who want quick updates on the move. Hook and Payoff generates high-impact videos that are great for video feeds and social platforms, where grabbing attention is the first challenge. Presenter Voiceover works particularly well when paired with cloned newsroom voices, as it enables warmer, more personable narration across your video output. All templates are designed to preserve the tone and meaning of the original article, so resulting videos and audios reflect your journalism accurately. You can find the full selection of pre-made script templates—or create your own—in your BeyondWords dashboard. Create custom script templates. With custom script templates, you can define your own instructions for how articles should transform into audio and video scripts. This allows you to align with an existing video content strategy, cater to specific video use cases, and experiment with new storytelling approaches. Want to use a different template based on brand, section, or platform? Organize your content into projects and create a template for each. If needed, you can override the default on a per-article basis. Start extracting more value from every story. BeyondWords turns articles into format-native video and audio stories at scale. So you can improve engagement, reach new audiences, and boost advertising revenue—without adding work for your team. Here's a quick overview of how audio and video automation works: 1. Integrate BeyondWords with your website and app. 2. Choose or create a script template to control how articles are transformed into scripts. 3. Choose or create a style template to define the visual look of your videos. 4. Select a voice or create a voice clone for consistent, on-brand narration. 5. Configure background music, distribution, monetization, and more. 6. Publish as normal and let audio and video versions appear automatically. Prefer to keep humans in the loop? You can create, review, edit, and manage content through your BeyondWords dashboard. To see the full workflow in action, book a demo with our team.

    3 min

  4. JAN 19

    Rethinking content extraction for audio and video automation

    Article-to-audio and video automation only works if you extract the right content first. For publishers, this step is a constant source of friction. Modern news pages are dynamic, JavaScript-heavy, and packed with non-editorial elements, but most content extraction methods still rely on fixed HTML rules tied to page structure. This can result in navigational elements, ads, and other unwanted elements appearing in audio and video assets. Or your team having to spend time specifying content manually. That's why we built a more reliable content extraction method. Introducing automatic extraction BeyondWords now offers automatic extraction, which is powered by AI. Our model interprets the context of a page and accurately identifies which text and images actually belong to the article, even when layouts vary or content is rendered dynamically. The extracted content then flows through the rest of the BeyondWords workflow to generate audio and video, based on your settings. Automatic extraction delivers practical benefits for publishers: Cleaner, more faithful audio and video versions of your articles; Reduced need for per-site configuration and manual tuning; Better adaptability across layouts, frameworks, and CMSs; and More reliable scaling across diverse publisher environments. Solving the content extraction problem took a lot of engineering effort. We evaluated several tools, compared benchmarks, and iterated several times to finally arrive at a solution that yields high-quality results. Optional filters and metadata controls are available for publishers who want to refine what content is extracted, but most sites won't need them. We also added controls that allow publishers to limit which domains the workflow is allowed to run and to set HTTP headers to bypass paywalls, so our servers always have access to the necessary content. Automatic extraction in action To give you an example, we ran a media-rich news article through BeyondWords using the automatic extraction setting. The screenshot below highlights which parts of the article were used to generate the audio and/or video versions—and which parts were automatically excluded. BeyondWords accurately identified the editorial text and images for inclusion in the audio and video versions. Unwanted elements—such as the navigation menu, advertising banner, author byline, key points, call-to-action button, image caption, content sidebar, and footer—were rightfully excluded. And this was all done automatically. The next step: Developing a change detection algorithm Improving initial extraction only solves part of the problem. For audio and video automation to meet newsroom needs, article updates must be detected and reflected accurately. A potential solution is to repeatedly fetch the page and rerun the entire extraction and AI pipeline, but this method is inefficient and could be unstable. It can also introduce unnecessary costs—especially when changes are minor or purely superficial. To avoid this, we developed a change detection algorithm. This compares newly fetched HTML with the content extracted previously to determine what has changed. So, audio and video stay in sync with article edits, without manual intervention or excessive processing. Built to fit your publishing stack Automatic content extraction is built directly into our Magic Embed integration, making it easy to enable audio and video across your publication. Add a small script to your website, then let BeyondWords handle the rest—including content extraction, audio and video generation, distribution, monetization, and analytics. You can manage settings and content centrally through your BeyondWords dashboard. Want to see how it works in practice? Book a demo today.

    4 min

  5. JAN 7

    Vertical video is the next big news format—is your newsroom ready?

    Vertical video is moving from social platforms into the heart of news products. Over the past year, publishers like The New York Times, The Economist, and CNN have introduced vertical-video feeds across their homepages and apps. These new "Watch" tabs signal a clear shift: social-style video is becoming a core output for modern newsrooms. The opportunity. Social platforms like Instagram and TikTok have made short-form vertical video a daily habit for millions. 73% of U.S. consumers watch short-form video multiple times per day, according to Media.net. And 90% of consumers are open to seeing these formats on publisher sites. This presents a clear opportunity for newsrooms to bring a popular format into their own ecosystems, where engagement can be owned and monetized. INMA's Advertising Initiative Lead, Gabriel Dorosz, says short-form vertical video is "the biggest ad opportunity for news." Advertisers are expected to redirect US$146 billion from display advertising into short-form video advertising by 2028. Publishers are also using vertical video to drive subscription revenue. The Economist's paid subscribers have doubled their vertical video consumption over the past year, according to Nieman Lab, helping the publisher to tackle the "unread guilt factor" that so often drives subscription cancellations. The challenge. To deliver a TikTok-style experience inside your news app, you need a constant supply of timely vertical video. Traditional production workflows simply can't keep pace. Each clip demands scripting, recording, editing, approvals, and coordination—an intensive chain of tasks that makes high-volume output hard to sustain. And by the time a video is ready, the story's moment may have already passed. Costs add up quickly, too. Relying on traditional video production makes it tough to generate a return on investment. Newsrooms need a fast, scalable way to turn articles into vertical video. That's where BeyondWords comes in. The solution. BeyondWords automatically converts your articles into vertical videos and delivers them directly into your websites, apps, and feeds. So you can publish videos as quickly and consistently as you publish stories. It's the simple, commercially smart way to satisfy modern media habits. Videos can be fully customized to fit your brand and audience. You can: turn full articles into video or generate video-specific scripts using AI; choose an ElevenLabs or Azure voice, or clone your own voices for narration; auto-insert relevant images and videos from Getty or your own DAM system; and customize the visual style of your videos, including captions and branding. Our platform can also generate horizontal videos and audio versions from the same article, allowing you to repurpose stories across multiple formats and channels without additional work. Just integrate, configure, then let BeyondWords do the rest. Want to know more? Book a demo with our team.

    3 min

  6. 12/18/2025

    Introducing scalable video for every newsroom

    Audiences want it. Platforms reward it. Advertisers pay premiums for it. Demand for video has never been higher. And now, production moves at newsroom speeds. BeyondWords automatically converts your written articles into fully produced videos, with distribution, monetization, and analytics built in. So you can capitalize on modern media habits without the cost or complexity of traditional production. See what's possible The BeyondWords video generator brings articles to life with hyper-realistic narration, dynamic visuals, engaging captions, background music, waveforms, and built-in branding—all tailored to your publication's style. BeyondWords even offers a built-in script generator that converts your stories into video-friendly narratives. You can choose from a variety of preset styles or define your own prompts. You can create vertical and horizontal videos, with automatic asset resizing for each format. And insert independent video clips—such as logo stings, ads, and contextual footage. These videos started out as standard articles. Now, they're polished assets ready to engage audiences on websites, apps, and third-party platforms Built for the economics of modern newsrooms With BeyondWords, you produce video at a fraction of the usual cost and in a fraction of the usual time. You also get the distribution and monetization tools needed to extract maximum value with minimum effort. So, you can experiment and scale without adding pressure to your editorial teams—or your bottom line. Follow publishers like the New York Times and CNN by adding vertical video feeds to your homepage and app. Monetize every article with an ad-supported video version. And reach new audiences on platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. This is your chance to get ahead—and stay ahead—of the video curve. Want to see BeyondWords video in action? Book a demo with our team.

    2 min

  7. 12/10/2025

    Should newsrooms build or buy an AI audio stack? General-purpose TTS APIs vs BeyondWords at a glance Content extraction Voice selection Pronunciation accuracy Integration Editorial workflow Distribution Monetization Analytics Video generation Costs and

    As newsrooms expand into AI audio, many face the same strategic choice: Build your own workflow using a general-purpose TTS API, or let BeyondWords handle everything for you. In other words, should you build or buy your audio stack? In this post, we'll compare these two AI audio approaches. So you can choose the one that makes sense for your newsroom. Using a general-purpose TTS API means engineering your own stack and workflow. A service like Polly, Azure, Google, ElevenLabs, Hume, or Cartesia handles audio generation, and you build the surrounding infrastructure. This gives you full control over your stack, but it takes a lot of work. On the other hand, BeyondWords provides everything you need out of the box - content generation, distribution, analytics, monetization - giving you a complete workflow with far less engineering effort. The company also provides ongoing support and product development. General-purpose TTS APIs don't extract or clean your content - your team has to build a system that identifies which parts of each article should be narrated and which should be excluded. Without proper extraction, elements such as navigation labels, captions, inline components, related links, or HTML fragments may end up in the audio. Most newsrooms solve this by building custom logic to parse article templates, strip out unwanted elements, and deliver only clean editorial content to the API. This approach works, but it requires maintenance whenever templates or CMS structures change. BeyondWords offers Magic Embed, Ghost, and WordPress integrations, which automatically extract clean editorial content for narration. This ensures a great listening experience and keeps audio consistent through CMS changes, removing the ongoing maintenance your team would otherwise have to manage. If you use our API or RSS Feed Importer, you will need to set up and maintain extraction logic. But our support team will be on hand to help you with any issues. General-purpose TTS APIs like Polly, Azure, Google, ElevenLabs, Hume, and Cartesia offer wide selections of high-quality voices, but these voices are built for various use cases (such as video game characters). So, you may need to sift through dozens to find one suitable for news narration. Some providers, including ElevenLabs and Azure, also offer voice cloning. The quality, training requirements, and licensing vary by model, so your results depend heavily on which provider you choose. Once you pick a provider, you're largely locked into its capabilities. If another vendor releases better voices or more advanced cloning, moving over isn't trivial - it typically means updating your integration, rebuilding parts of your workflow, and adapting to a new set of tools. BeyondWords is built to keep pace with rapid advances in voice technology. We integrate high-performing voices and cloning models from providers like Azure and ElevenLabs, expanding our support for new models as they reach the quality bar our publishers expect. This gives you long-term flexibility: your audio quality improves as the market evolves, without requiring you to rework your workflow or switch vendors. We also curate the voices available in the platform to ensure they meet newsroom standards, and we can help you select the right voice for any publication. That expertise leads to stronger sonic branding and saves your newsroom from evaluating an ever-growing list of models. Most general-purpose TTS APIs perform basic text normalization before generating audio, automatically converting non-standard text like numbers, dates, and abbreviations into their expected spoken forms. However, these systems aren't context-aware, so they can misinterpret ambiguous elements - for example, reading "$" as "dollars" when the article means "pesos". These APIs generally let you correct mispronunciations by adding custom pronunciation rules through SSML or a lexicon, but these fixes must be created and maintained manually. BeyondWords includes ...

    15 min

  8. 12/01/2025

    Livingdocs and BeyondWords partner to simplify audio and video publishing

    We're excited to announce that BeyondWords has partnered with Livingdocs, a leading editorial system, to make it easier for newsrooms to expand into audio and video publishing. Once connected to Livingdocs, BeyondWords automatically generates audio and video versions of published articles. This allows newsrooms to unlock the potential of multimedia content without adding any steps to their editorial workflow. Capitalizing on modern media habits As audiences increasingly switch between reading, listening, and watching, publishers need flexible ways to deliver content across formats. BeyondWords and Livingdocs make that possible, helping publishers reach more readers, boost engagement, and create new revenue opportunities. Céline Tykve, Head of Business at Livingdocs, says: "Our publishers want to innovate and adapt, but they also need to maintain the speed and simplicity of their workflows. By partnering with BeyondWords, we're helping them expand into audio and video in a way that's efficient, cost-effective, and aligned with how they already publish." Tailoring audio and video to each publication Livingdocs publishers can use BeyondWords' voice cloning tools to create their own AI voices or choose from an extensive library of lifelike voices. Custom pronunciation rules and text preprocessing ensure every story is narrated naturally and accurately. Publishers can also customize the audio player, video captions, and other elements to ensure multimedia formats align seamlessly with their brand identity. "At BeyondWords, we understand how much Livingdocs publishers care about their brand voice and editorial standards," says Patrick O'Flaherty, BeyondWords Co-Founder and CEO. "We help them maintain that identity and quality as they expand their storytelling into audio and video." To learn more about how Livingdocs and BeyondWords can work together in your newsroom, get in touch with our team.

    2 min
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Stories, insights, and announcements from the BeyondWords blog—read aloud by AI. Learn how publishers are using audio and video to shape the future of digital storytelling.

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  • Creator
    BeyondWords
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    49
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © BeyondWords
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    BeyondWords Blog