A first look at Playpost for Publishers and a new Dark Mode theme
In this update:
- A first look at “Playpost for Publishers”.
- Introducing a new Dark Mode theme.
- Faster time to play.
- Better punctuation, sounding more natural.
App updates are available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
👨💻 A first look at Playpost for Publishers
Playpost for Publishers is a new way for your audience to digest your articles and integrates neatly with our app for iOS and Android.
With Playpost for Publishers, you can add audio articles to your website with minimal effort. Even automate the whole process by integrating it in your workflow of publishing new articles. So you can grow your audience by giving them a new way to digest your articles using our 240+ different voices in 28 different languages. Or even use your own recordings.
We love to get in contact with publishers to beta test this new service with. You can signup for early access on our website. We’ll let you know first when we launch.
Why should I provide audio versions of my articles?
To answer that we need to look at how people use their time daily. There is so much to read, but everyone can relate to not having the time to read it all. With audio articles, you can just listen to it. While commuting to work. While walking to the grocery store. While working out. Or when you can’t look at your screen but have the ability to listen. You might even have more time available during the day to listen to something, then time to read. You just need some help to make the best use of that time. Playpost fits right in.
By giving your audience multiple ways to digest your articles, you can provide your audience with a better service that fits more into how they use their time on a daily basis. It’s also more likely they stick around and come back again because of that. Giving you a stronger returning audience base.
Embedding audio in your articles
Part of Playpost for Publishers is our embeddable player, which allows you to directly embed the audio version of your article in the article itself. Your audience can read your article as they do now or directly listen to it, without the need for an app. Your audience can also save the audio article to their playlist in the Playpost app and listen to it when they want to.
Adding the article directly to your playlist in the Playpost app works if the user has the Playpost app installed. It will directly open the app and ask the user to add the article to his/her playlist. You can try it out with the examples in this article if you have the latest version (1.7.0) of our app installed.
We’ll be working on features to do that on every device you own, like your laptop or desktop computer. More on that later this year.
Player customization
Almost everything in the player is customizable to match your brand. For example, the play button, track colors and what the title should be.
Or something like this, to match Medium’s style:
The player is compatible with PlayerJS. This opens up possibilities to create and design your own player and use our embeddable player as the source of that. So you can integrate an audio player into your website or apps just the way you want to.
Documentation of the embeddable player and the available options will be released when we launch Playpost for Publishers.
🌑 Introducing a new Dark Mode theme
With the introduction of iOS’s “Dark Mode” we now also offer a theme that uses that feature. More pleasing to your eyes in low light situations. The same theme is also available in the Android version.
🚀 Faster time to play
We have made some big progress in our ongoing challenge to deliver the audio to you as fast as possible. The “time to play”, that is; the time between pressing play and until the audio starts playing, has been reduced up to 5x. So, less time waiting, more time listening!
👏 Better punctuation, sounding more natural
Before the 6th of October, some voices were talking way too fast and did not use correct punctuation, like pauses between sentences. It was like listening to someone reading a whole article without breathing. That’s way too intense to listen to. All our voices now use correct punctuation which results in way better audio to listen to!
