If you’re the owner and operator of a WordPress website, leveraging a text to speech tool to your advantage brings with it a wide range of different benefits that cannot be ignored. If you haven’t searched for a WordPress text-to-speech plugin yet, you will soon. It’s inevitable.
When you do, you might find a few. We’re here to help you make the best decision for your website and your valued users.
WordPress as a CMS has grown since its official release in 2003. Anyone remember B2 Blog? Since then it has grown in leaps and bounds. More recently with the switch to Gutenberg. WordPress themes and plugins are its own cottage industry with page builders being the more recent. All of these were birthed from WordPress
Text-to-speech, artificial intelligence, and machine learning however weren’t birthed from WordPress. They’ve been making steady progress with mainstream adoption. It’s time these two worlds met. Specifically Text-to-speech and WordPress
Why Text-to-Speech for WordPress
For starters, never forget the fact that some people have visual impairments that may make it difficult for them to fully experience the content you’ve already worked so hard to create. They want to read that interesting-sounding blog post you just published, but due to visual issues or even blindness they may not be able to. When you offer a text to speech option, you’re making sure that you’re not leaving scores of potential visitors out in the cold.
Give them the audio version of your website. Instantly convert all your articles to audio.
Beyond that, the popularity of audio content on the Internet has never been more popular than it is right now. Maybe the best example of this has to do with podcasts – a medium that is relatively new that has already overtaken traditional radio as one of the core audio experiences that users love.
All told, audio content is popular because it presents users with an almost unparalleled level of choice. They don’t have to find the time to sit down in front of a computer to actually read a piece of content. They can take it with them on-the-go and listen to it on their morning commute, while they’re running errands, while they’re at the gym working out or even while they’re cooking dinner. All of this not only helps convey whatever information you’re trying to get across, but it does so by way of an experience that users love as well.
If you want to add such functionality to your own WordPress site, you can quickly become overwhelmed with the vast number of options that are available to you. That’s why, before you select any of the best text to speech for WordPress options to go with, there are a few important things to keep in mind.
The Best Text to Speech Options for WordPress
Examples of some of the best text to speech for WordPress tools include but are certainly not limited to the following:
Play.ht
In the pantheon of the best best text to speech for WordPress options, Play.ht is certainly one of the more efficient. The service offers more than 100 realistic-sounding voices for you to choose from, allowing you to make a selection based on the tone and overall experience you’re going for. In addition to offering a dedicated WordPress plugin, it’s also a cloud-based service – meaning that it is compatible with virtually any platform that supports HTML like Blogger or even Tumblr.
One of the downsides, however, is that the use of the tool can be relatively expensive. The basic plan is $90, and it only allows you to convert 120,000 words to audio per year.
SpeechKit
The SpeechKit plugin also allows you to convert all of your articles into audio content, making one of the best text to speech for WordPress out there. This one offers not only more than 200 realistic-sounding voices, but is compatible with 28 different languages as well.
SpeechKit is notable for enabling programmatic ad placement options, too. This is especially helpful if you’re using your WordPress site not just as a blog or site to promote your business, but as a way to generate additional revenue as well.
Some users, however, find that SpeechKit lacks the customization features found in other options. It will function the way you need it to but in terms of flexibility (meaning that if you want to make sure it fits in with your overall intentions for your site), it may not offer quite what you’re after.
Trinity Audio
Next up on the list of the best text to speech for WordPress solutions is Trinity Audio, which is actually three distinct products that largely come in the same package.
The first is the Player, which allows you to quickly add an audio option to virtually any piece of content on your site. Then, you have Pulse – a tool that lets website visitors find new and interesting content that may have otherwise gone undiscovered had they not known what to look for in the first place. Finally, there is the Skills feature – making your WordPress site compatible with smart home audio equipment like Amazon Alexa devices.
While Trinity Audio does have a lot of helpful functionality, it’s far from the easiest solution out there. Implementation can be a challenge in certain situations and, if you want to use all three Trinity Audio products, you essentially have to go through this same experience multiple times.
ResponsiveVoice
Also worth a mention in the context of the best text to speech for WordPress solutions is ResponsiveVoice – a WordPress plugin that relies heavily on HTML5 for operation. It works similarly in concept to some of the other options on this list and also adds in the ability to add voiceover narration to any video content that you’ve created, too.
One of the things that people sometimes find limiting about ResponsiveVoice, however, is that it isn’t quite as far-reaching as alternative plugins when it comes to customization. It supports 51 different language and includes roughly 170 unique voices, but you can certainly find competing services that offer more like Speechify.
Implementation can also be difficult at times, especially if you don’t want the WordPress plugin to read an entire piece of content and just want it to call out specific sections or paragraphs. This will require making changes to the code, which depending on your skill level can sometimes be easier said than done.
Remixd
Remixd is another of the best text to speech for WordPress options that allows site administrators to again choose from not only multiple voices, but to also control the speed at which content is played back. This can create a more engaging and accessible experience on mobile devices in particular. Like some of the other services on this list, Remixd also allows you to run ad campaigns along with your content to create an additional source of revenue.
While certainly helpful in general, some users run into an issue with Remixd when it comes to the price. The actual cost of the plugin isn’t listed on the organization’s website at all. Instead, you have to contact their support team and give them more information about what you hope to accomplish so that they can come up with a pricing structure that works for you.
This sometimes makes implementation difficult than alternative services simply because you can’t get up and running in a matter of minutes – it’s going to require a bit of back-and-forth between yourself and the Remixd team to make that happen.
As stated, these are a few of the more generic plugin options that are available for you to choose from. There is one more solution that people often find helps them better accomplish their goals – Speechify.
The Better Alternative: Speechify For WordPress
The best option for unlocking text to speech on WordPress takes the form of Speechify – a solution that can allow you to turn every blog, page, or custom post type into speech. It turns your text into the best high-quality, natural sounding human voice.
Unlike some of the other options, implementing Speechify isn’t just easy – it’s practically effortless. What you would expect to take days or even hours can be done in a matter of minutes. You don’t even need to learn to code – all you have to do is insert the existing code into your WordPress site, and you’ll be up and running before you know it.
The Speechify API is easy to add to your WordPress site for all your users to enjoy.
Speechify Plugin for WordPress
There is no Speechify plugin for WordPress because you don’t need one. WordPress plugins can bog down your site with unnecessary files and could cause compatibility issues. Implementing Speechify Text-to-Speech on WordPress is easy. It takes just minutes. Paste a few lines of Java script and you are good to go! With all the options in WordPress today, you don’t need to be a developer to do this.
Speechify does the heavy lifting. All processing is done on AWS servers and is almost instantaneous. Load times? Core Web Vitals? Not a problem. Speechify is blazingly fast. Plus the value it brings to your website or network of websites and your users far outweighs anything.
An example of the Speechify API integration with JS:
import(
"https://storage.googleapis.com/speechify-api-cdn/speechifyapi.min.mjs"
).then(async (speechifyWidget) => {
// this parent element for your article or listenable content
const articleRootElement = document.querySelector("article");
// this is the header of your article; the inline player will be placed under this heading
const articleHeading = articleRootElement.querySelector("h1");
const widget = speechifyWidget.makeSpeechifyExperience({
rootElement: articleRootElement,
inlinePlayerElement: articleHeading,
});
await widget.mount();
});
Once you’ve imported the package using the “import” function, you can get the parent element for the content you want to turn it into high quality audio. Again, this can be an article, a blog post or any other type of content that you’re working with.
If you’d like to use the Speechify inline player, you simply need to get the element for the title of the content you are working with. The inline player will then be placed under that title, making it easy to use for your users.
At that point, all you have to do is mount the Speechify API, and you’re ready-to-go. Truly, it doesn’t get much more straightforward than that.
At this point, you can also fully customize the design of the player to fit the basic aesthetic theme of your WordPress site.
Check out Medium – perhaps one of the largest blog platforms. Since they integrated with Speechify, they’ve seen phenomenal results. The audio player is customized with features in any plugin offers. Medium customized the play button by adding a listen button just beneath the headline of millions of their blogs.
Truly, this is a better option than using one of the aforementioned plugins for a few different reasons. Plugins often have dependencies with other elements that you have no control over, which means that the experience can suffer if backend changes are made – forcing you back to the drawing board.
A lot of plugins also have compatibility issues with certain types of web browsers. What works totally fine in Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome may not function quite as well in Apple’s Safari browser, for example. This is another aspect that you don’t have much control over, and it can cause significant experience issues on behalf of the people who are visiting your site.
Depending on the circumstances plugins may also put an unnecessary amount of stress on a user’s device. This is especially difficult for laptop and smartphone users who depend on a full battery charge to get through the day.
If a plugin uses so many system resources that it ultimately drains a quarter of someone’s battery in the amount of time it takes to get through a few pieces of content, you’re not really offering the superior user experience that you thought you were.
In the end, WordPress site administrators will love Speechify because it’s easy to use and offers the high quality audio experience they’re after without the stress and frustration that normally comes along with more traditional plugins. Rather than forcing someone to deal with a plugin (and trying to maintain things on your end), you can simply copy and paste code into your site, and you won’t have much to concern yourself with after that.
It’s a situation where everybody wins – from site administrators to the users who want to experience your content how they want, wherever they want. That in and of itself may be the most important benefit of all.
If you’d like to find out more information about the best text to speech options for WordPress, or if you’d just like to see up close and personal what Speechify can do for you, please don’t hesitate to contact us today.
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