WordPress 1.7.1: the plugin keeps up with the newsroom
Publishing no longer holds the editor, the \"Generate audio\" button re-narrates a corrected article, and the voice catalogue follows the plan on its own. Three adjustments to the WordPress plugin.
A publishing plugin is judged at one precise moment: the instant someone clicks Publish. If that click hesitates, everything else becomes secondary. This version of the WordPress plugin is about those gestures (publishing, correcting, changing plan) and about what they should produce without anyone having to think about it.
Publishing and updating no longer hold the editor
Narration now runs in the background. Saving an article finishes at WordPress speed rather than at the speed of a network round trip, and control comes back immediately.
The detail matters more than it looks, because a published article is not a finished article. It gets re-read, corrected, adjusted, sometimes ten times in the day that follows. Each of those touch-ups goes through the same save as the original publication. What is acceptable once stops being acceptable on the tenth pass: the work now happens in the background, and the newsroom never sees it.
The voice is resolved when narration starts, not when it is queued. Between the two, the article's section or its author may have changed, the state at generation time is what counts, and it is the only one that is right.
"Generate audio" genuinely re-narrates a corrected article
When the text of an already-narrated article changes, the service never re-runs synthesis on its own. That is deliberate, and we are keeping it: a mid-afternoon typo fix should not consume a generation. The published audio keeps being served, and the article is simply marked as needing regeneration.
Re-narration is therefore an explicit act, and it has a place: the "Generate audio" button in the editor panel. It now relaunches narration on the current version of the text, without a detour through your account.
The status shown beside the button also separates three situations that used to read as one: the audio is ready, it is being prepared, or its publication is scheduled. A displayed status has to match what actually happened, audio announced as ready when it is not costs more in trust than it gains in convenience.
The voice catalogue follows the plan
Each plan opens its own voice catalogue, and those catalogues do not overlap: changing plan does not narrow the choice, it replaces it. A voice saved for the site, for an author or for a section then points at a voice that no longer belongs to the current catalogue.
The plugin now handles this by itself. It checks the catalogue before each send; if the saved voice is no longer there, the article is narrated with the account's default voice rather than left with no audio version at all. The voice concerned stays visible in the list, flagged as such, instead of vanishing and suggesting no choice had ever been made. And a message in the admin names exactly what needs a new choice: the site voice, a given section.
One distinction we made a point of writing into the code as much as into this page: an unreachable catalogue is not an empty catalogue. If the service does not answer, the plugin changes nothing and declares no voice invalid. A doubt is not grounds for undoing a setting.
What it changes for you
Nothing to reconfigure. Update the plugin from your WordPress admin, or download it again from your account under "My sites". Your settings, your per-section voices and your per-author voices are kept exactly as they are.
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