Text to Speech conversion — What content marketers are missing out
77% of Internet users read blogs. (Impacbnd)
That’s a massive potential audience even if you could target 10% of these readers. However, our current “digital generation” battles a shorter attention span.
It’s almost a no-brainer that the number of readers will increase slower than now in the future while the number of audio listeners will increase. Here’s where text to speech app converters or TTS apps step in.
The biggest benefit of audio content is convenience. Listening allows you to multitask. and this is changing the content marketing playbook by many degrees. The global audiobook industry was evaluated at $3.5 billion in early 2017. This statistic is increasing at a staggering rate. Enough for content marketers to take notice and harness it.
Besides, audio content is also a great way to connect with otherwise hard to reach people.
Popular social media influencer and guru Hiten Shah swears by audio content and can even grasp its meaning at 3X speed. Isn’t that something? Okay, we don’t all start with at that speed but that’s also something avid readers and listeners can adapt and condition themselves to over time.
Imagine how much more your content can run deep and wide if people don’t need to just sit and read it but also have the option to listen to it. People who were listening to podcasts while driving or washing the dishes will now have the option to hear what you’re blogging about. As a business that’s a great possibility! Take for e.g. popular blog website Firstround. Now you can not just read their articles but also hear them while you can take care of routine tasks on the side.
Provided the quality of your content is good, you can now double or triple the traffic by introducing a text to speech converter. At Alore CRM, we are planning to get started with this. Here is a crude drawing of how we envision our need:
Sharing the shortlisted and rejected (or rather misaligned to our need ) list of software we explored. Shall soon zero down on this and implement by end July. 🙂
The current text to speech software shortlist:
It is a platform which helps in converting articles from Medium, Pocket etc to podcasts. The podcast works with superior quality voices and can be modified as a playlist. Based on the plan you have, it allows you to choose the language or accent you want the voice in. Neat!
This is a text to audio converter which you can use on WordPress hosted sites with the help of the WordPress Plugin, API or text converter. It also provides a feature where your audio content after the article conversion will be distributed and hosted on third-party audio and voice platforms.
It is an integrated program designed for Android, Mac and Windows operating system. Listen helps you listen to the articles that you’ve saved in your pocket account. It does so in a playlist format which makes it easy to choose from for the user. In pocket, the system allows reading the selected article out loud by helping a user to listen to the article in a human-like listening voice.
This is a function provided by the popular blogging platform Medium where audio files hosted externally can be embedded into the article. The drawback is that you need to create and host an audio file on an external platform like Soundcloud or Anchor.fm, Tapewrite etc. first.
Amazon Polly is a subset of the Amazon web services suite. It uses deep learning to help convert text to speech in various languages and create a podcast of your blog. A user can select to build a speech-enabled application with the choice of voice and accent as per user requirement.
Some other TTS software considered in the first list ( and now removed):
This is a great text to speech converter which can be used for converting documents — pdfs, word docs etc. to audio files or creating video voiceovers. However, it’s a personal use app which means that as a marketer cannot offer it to our blogs audience as a service. The user needs to log into his/her app and convert text to speech.
It helps turn chosen website content into a podcast.
This is a super interesting app but it is an external third party app. A user needs to have Motoread chrome extension and add articles they would like to hear. These will appear like a playlist and the user can hear them at a speed of their choice.
It’s great for people who would like to digest a lot of content from various sources. However, as a content marketer I found my position weak with it since I will be dependant on people who have the Motoread app + subscribed to our blog and have added our blog into their playlist.
This is a third-party website which works much like you’d use Google Translate. You add the article text to a text box and it translates the text to speech. This I guess would be more useful for people not fluent in English to hear articles or snippets.
There are also some others like Leaf and Ahoy news which is great RSS news reader for IOS devices.
I’d love to listen what my fellow marketers have to say about the growth of audio content and its effect and relevance in content marketing. Drop in a comment or write to deepika@plash.in !
Originally published at blog.alore.io on June 21, 2018.
