How To Add Text To Speech To WordPress

The way users search for content is evolving. This means that people are searching and consuming content in new ways that haven’t been even thought of before. One of these ways is to listen to the articles instead of reading them. But how do you turn your awesome blog posts or article into speech when you don’t own a microphone, don’t want to capture your own voice, or just want to keep it as simple as possible. Thankfully there are several options and in this article, we will teach you how to add text to speech to your WordPress site and how to turn your article from just text to speech as well.

Getting started with a text to speech

To get started we will be needing the service called BeyondWords. They offer free and premium plans for their text-to-speech service and for this example, we will be using the free version that allows us to turn 30 000 characters to voice.

To get started click here to create your free account.

BeyondWords frontpage

Creating your first project

After creating your account you will need to create your first project. In our case, we named it “Blog Inbox” after the site. As a free user, you can create only one project. Each project will contain text-to-speech files that you can create as you wish.

BeyondWords all projects

Applying the right settings

Before we jump forward too much let’s head on to the project settings. Here you can apply intro and outro music if you wish and select the default AI voice. Pick a voice that sounds the most natural to you, but don’t worry. You can use multiple voices when creating your text to speech later on and even change it if you are not happy. Just remember that each run of the program will cost you characters.

BeyondWords project settings

When you are happy with the settings and the voice you like, simply click “Save settings” to save them and we can move on to creating our first text to speech.

Using AI to turn your text into speech

Now for the fun part. Now that we have set up the project and settings we can create our first text to speech files. Select the “Create audio” from the top right corner to get started.

BeyondWords content

In the editor, you can add a title and text freely. If you wish to change the reading voice for some parts of your text, you need to press enter and start a new line. Then simply click the reader’s name on the left and you can change it to whatever voice you wish to read that line.

BeyondWords editor

If you wish to save the new text to speed for later press “Save draft” or if you wish to publish it simply press “Publish“. When you wish to publish you will be prompted and asked for the publisher’s name and link to the article, but these are optional and are not required.

Click “Publish” and BeyondWords will take a moment to create the audio.

BeyondWords create an audiot

Adding your new text to speech to WordPress

When the audio has been published you can easily grab it from the BeyondWords as a player. Simply hover your mouse over the audio and you can see the “Get embed code” button. Click it and you will see two different choices.

You can either choose the “Small Player” or the “Medium Player“. In our case, we went with the “Small Player”.

After copying the iframe code head on to your WordPress. Depending on the editor your using you will need to choose the HTML block. In Gutenberg simply write “/html” or find it from the blocks and you can then paste the code we copied from BeyondWords.

Gutenberg html block

In Elementor, search for “HTML” in your editor and paste the code again in the right place.

Elementor html widget

If you don’t like the default colors of the player you can edit them in the “Distribution” area of your BeyondWords project.

Conclusion

After all, is done and published your article in WordPress should now have an audio version of itself that visitors can listen to. Adding text to speech to your page is a great way to increase your site’s usability and it gives your visitors a new way to consume their favorite media.

Don’t forget to like and share this post if you liked it and comment below what you think of text to speech. Is it the future and should more blogs and sites implement it on their websites?

FAQ

Text to speech usually means turning text to voice through a synthetic voice. This can be easily done with AI that will read your text out loud to the user.

Text-to-speech is commonly used as an accessibility feature to help people who have trouble reading on-screen text, but it also helps those who don’t want to read the text but instead want to listen.

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One Comment

  1. Thank you for sharing this. We’re so glad you’re enjoying the platform!

    We also offer a WordPress plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/speechkit/), which allows you to automate audio production and embeds for posts in selected categories. If you have a compatible setup this can save you a lot of time, especially when publishing at scale.

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