Adding an audio version to your Magento pages

Magento (Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source) powers demanding stores, with deep catalogues, detailed product pages and often a blog bolted on for search. The flip side is that you do not add a feature the way you would in WordPress: there is no extension directory to browse for a button, the theme architecture is layered, and the technical team is already busy. Adding an audio version of your product pages and articles is one of those tasks that looks like a week of developer time. In practice, on Magento, audio goes on through the front end and the feeds, without touching the core of the store. Here are the three ways to do it, from the fastest to the most automated.

The player: an embed in your theme

Magento renders each page from theme templates. To show the audio player on all your product pages or all your articles at once, insert one embed block at the right place in the template, rather than pasting it page by page.

The block is a single line:

``
<script src="https://wedispatch.fr/player.js"
data-article="ARTICLE_ID" defer></script>
``

Two placements are possible depending on your comfort with Magento. The cleanest is to add the embed to the template for the page type you want (the product page, or the article template from your blog extension), so it appears everywhere automatically. The fastest, without touching the theme, is to drop it into a CMS Block that you insert into the layout from the admin. Because the player lives in the template or block rather than in each piece of content, you place it once and every future publication inherits it.

Linking the player to the right content

Then you tell the system which audio belongs to which page. Two approaches. The first lets detection work from the page address: you send us the URL, the text is extracted from the published page, the audio is matched, and there is no field to create. The second, more robust one, relies on a stable identifier (a product SKU, an article ID) that you bind to the data-article attribute. That keeps the right audio even if the URL changes during a catalogue rework. It takes a few minutes to set up, but it spares you nasty surprises the day you reorganise.

Three ways to generate the audio

Showing the player is not enough: the file has to be produced. On Magento, you have three routes.

The RSS feed is the simplest. Magento exposes catalogue feeds natively, and most blog extensions (Magefan, Mageplaza and the like) publish their own. You give us the feed address, new content is detected as it goes live, the text is extracted and the audio generated with nothing to do on your side. It is the ideal option for a team that wants to publish as usual and find the player online automatically. The RSS feed is in fact the mode we recommend to most sites, whatever their engine.

The sitemap approach works on the same principle: Magento generates an XML sitemap, and you can point at it instead of a feed. Useful when the pages you want narrated do not all flow through a single feed, which is common between the catalogue and the blog.

Finally, if you need control, generating audio at a precise moment, choosing the voice, handling corrections, the API is open. A Magento site can trigger a call when a product or article is saved, through an event observer, a Magento integration, or an automation tool such as Make or Zapier. It is more work up front, but it hands you the whole chain.

Read-along, accessibility and compliance

Whichever mode you pick, you can turn on read-along: the text appears and highlights word by word as the audio plays. In a store, this helps dyslexic or low-vision customers, and it is part of a serious accessibility posture, which is no small thing now that the European Accessibility Act covers a large part of online commerce. Synchronised subtitles are set from your dashboard, with no change to Magento code.

When content changes

In a store, a price, a description or an article moves often. If you use the RSS feed or the sitemap, detection spots the update and marks the audio as "to regenerate": you re-run generation when the text has settled, and successive corrections are never re-billed. If you use the API, you resend the same external identifier with the corrected text. Either way, the audio already online keeps being served until you re-run, so no page is ever left without a player.

Where to start

For Magento, the fastest route is the RSS feed or sitemap combined with the embed in the theme: a short setup, no core changes, and every new piece of content ships with its audio version. If you want fine control or stable SKU-based identifiers, add the API. And if part of your presence runs on WordPress alongside the store, the dedicated plugin does the same job there without code: the detail is on the WordPress page. The technical specifics are in the documentation, the volume-based plans on the pricing page, and the simplest way to decide is to see the player running on one of your own pages: try it on a real page and listen before you equip the whole store. The reasoning on the cost and duration of an existing catalogue is laid out in how long it takes to add audio to an existing blog, and the neighbouring WooCommerce case in integrating audio into a WooCommerce site.

Read next

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• The middle dot out loud: what text-to-speech does with French inclusive writing