Adding audio listening to a Medium publication
Medium allows neither custom code nor a third-party player inside an article. Here is the realistic path to offer an audio version of your texts despite that constraint, with no hacks and no false promises.
Medium was built around one strong idea: the author writes, the platform handles everything else, formatting included. That is comfortable for publishing fast without worrying about technique. It is also a firm limit the moment you want to add a function Medium does not offer, such as an audio version of your articles wired to an external tool. Let us be plain about it: on Medium, you will not be able to insert an audio player into the body of an article the way you would on a site you control. Audio is not out of reach for all that, but the path is different, and it is worth knowing before you commit.
The constraint to know before you start
On a site you host, adding audio usually comes down to dropping a small piece of code that shows a player in the right place. That is what our plugin does for a standalone site, as the WordPress page describes. Medium does not allow that gesture: the editor accepts no HTML, no JavaScript, and no arbitrary embed inside the body of an article. The only content it will incorporate is from a list of services it recognises itself, and a third-party player dropped into the middle of the text is not on it. This is not an oversight, it is the platform's design. Trying to get around it wastes your time, and the workaround would break at the editor's next update.
Unlike some other closed platforms, Medium also offers no native audio section and no built-in podcast distribution. The comparison is useful here: on Substack you can at least feed an audio stream, as we describe in adding audio listening to a Substack publication. On Medium, that door does not exist. So you have to reason differently: produce the audio outside Medium, and attach it to your articles through the routes the platform does leave open.
What Medium actually leaves open
Two anchor points remain, and it helps to take them for what they are, no more and no less.
The first is the RSS feed. Every Medium publication and account exposes a feed at a public address (of the form medium.com/feed/@yourhandle). That is exactly the kind of entry point a narration service can hook into: it watches the feed, spots each new article the moment it appears, and produces an audio version without your having to touch Medium. This is the general approach we detail for any source in turn your news site into an automatic podcast, and its precise workings are described on the RSS feed page. It has a decisive advantage here: it needs no access inside Medium, only the public address of your feed. You change nothing, you attach a sensor to what Medium already publishes.
The second is the link. The audio produced from your feed is hosted at a stable address, playable in a browser. Nothing stops you from placing that link in your Medium article, at the top or the bottom, under a simple phrase like "Listen to this article". The reader leaves the page for a second to open the audio version. It is not the player woven into the text, but it is real access, and it works on a platform that refuses everything else.
What this path gives you, and what it does not
Let us be honest about the result. On Medium you will not get the small player at the top of the article with the text highlighting as it reads, because the platform does not allow it. What you will get is an audio version of your articles, produced automatically at publication from your feed, and reachable through a link your readers can follow. For many authors, that is the essential part: the subscriber can listen, on the move, to what they would not have had time to read.
If the in-page player really matters to you, the true answer is not to force Medium, it is to have a site you control, where insertion is free and the player follows the text. Many authors in fact keep both: Medium for reach and audience, a site of their own for reading and listening comfort. The feed that powers the audio can even be the same one, which avoids doing the work twice.
Try it on your own articles
The free WeDispatch plan lets you produce the audio version of your texts today, from your feed: try it now. The plans, from 69 to 419 EUR excluding VAT per month, are detailed on the pricing page.
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