Make Your WordPress Blog Accessible with Audio
A WordPress plugin that instantly turns your blogposts into audio podcasts.
Originally published on Play.ht
One of the most important things you can do to your content is making sure it is as accessible as possible…
What that means is, when users land on one of your blog posts, they are all going to be in different situations, some might be commuting, some walking, some at work, designing, etc.
This article will show you how to convert your blog posts to audio using the Play.ht WordPress plugin and make them available to your users as Podcasts.
Step 1 — Download and Install the Play.ht WordPress plugin
The first thing you need to do is download and activate the Play.ht plugin for WordPress.
Search for Play.ht on the plugin store, and install it.
On your Wordpress dashboard, click on the Plugins tab, and click on Add New.
Under the Plugins Menu, search for Play.ht, and once you get the plugin displayed, click on Install Now.
Once the plugin has been installed by WordPress, the last step is activating the plugin. Simply click on “Activate” to activate it.
Step 2 — Create a Free Account
After you have activated the plugin, you need to Sign up to try the product.
You will receive free words to try, which you can use to convert a part of your article to audio to see how it works.
Step 3 — Convert your Blogpost into an Audio Podcast
Now that you have signed and up received the free words, it’s time to convert some of your articles to audio!
i. Converting from All Posts page
Navigate to your ‘All Posts’ section and you should now see all your Articles or Posts.
This is where you can add voice for your articles.
Play.ht supports over 60+ languages with more than 508+ voices!
ii. Converting a Blog post to Audio
Select the post you want to add audio to, and click the Add Audio button.
You will see a popup with a loading icon, and you will be redirected to the Play Editor.
Here, you can edit your article by adding a high quality voice, and make your audio sound “the way you want it to sound”, by playing with Custom Pauses, Custom Pronunciations, changing the Tone, adding Emphasis to words, and much more!
Converting an article to audio depends on the length of the article and usually takes around a few seconds.
* Note: Knowing which articles have audio
Once the article is converted, you will see a speaker icon next to the article in the posts page telling you that the article is now listenable.
When the audio is ready Play.ht will automatically add an Audio Player at the top of the post and make the audio available to users for listening.
iii. Converting from the Editor page
You can also add audio to a post from the Editor page from the Play.ht Section at the end of the page.
Supported Languages and Voices
Play.ht supports over 60 languages and more than 508+ voices!
These are some of the languages Play.ht supports:
- Arabic
- English
- German
- Spanish
- French
- Italian
- Chinese
- Japanese
- Korean
- Malay
- Portuguese
- Turkish
- Russian
- Hindi
Updating audio when the blog post is updated
If you edit the text of a post that already has audio, then you can reflect those changes in audio by simply converting it to audio, again.
Since you are most likely to be in the editor page when you are making edits to the post, you can use the Play.ht controls from page to update the audio.
Please note that updating an audio uses words.
Changing the Audio Player’s position
By default. Play.ht positions the Audio Player at the beginning of the article but you can place it wherever you like using the Audio Player’s Short Code.
Here’s how to do it.
- Go to the Editor page of the post.
- Look for the Add Audio button in the Editor and click on it.
- Cut the generated Short Code and paste it wherever you like.
Customizing the Audio Player
There’s a lot of things you can customize in the audio player to change the look and feel of it and match it according to your theme’s design.
And there are many things you can change to enable or disable certain functionality.
Some of the important things you might want to configure are:
- Changing the color
- Remove Play.ht branding
- Add your own branding
- Enable email subscriptions
Analytics of your audio articles
Play.ht provides you with a comprehensive report of how many users are listening to your articles.
You will be able to see:
- Listens — The number of people listening to your articles. You can also filter the data per article to see if some articles are being listened more than others.
- Downloads — The number of times your articles are being downloaded as audio files.
- Shares — The number of times your articles are shared on Facebook or Twitter as audio.
Reaching out for help and support
We are always available for any help you need! Just send us a message on chat from the Play.ht dashboard or email us at — support@play.ht.
Want Play for your Medium Story? Check out The Play Chrome Extension here.
Note: You can only install plugins on your self hosted WordPress.org website and not on a WordPress.com website, unless you upgrade to their business plan.
