Editorial audio, term by term
The vocabulary of a news site's audio version, explained simply: the technology, the formats, the monetisation and the metrics. Enough to talk shop with any vendor.
Text-to-speech (TTS)
Text-to-speech converts written text into spoken audio. Recent neural models produce voices that are hard to tell apart from human speech.
Neural voice
A neural voice is generated by a neural network trained on human speech. Its natural prosody makes it hard to distinguish from a real narrator.
Automatic podcast
An automatic podcast turns published articles into audio episodes on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, with no manual production work required.
Audio pre-roll
An audio pre-roll is a short ad message played before an audio article starts. It creates a brand-new advertising inventory for publishers.
Midroll
A midroll is an advertising message inserted partway through a listen, ideally at a paragraph boundary so it never interrupts a sentence.
Read-along audio
Read-along audio highlights each word of the article as the voice speaks it, letting the user read and listen simultaneously on the page.
Automatic subtitles
Automatic subtitles are SRT or VTT files generated from the audio, displaying the right text at the right time in videos and players.
Signature voice
A signature voice is the cloned voice of a journalist or newsroom, used with written consent to narrate the publication's articles.
Audio registration wall
An audio registration wall plays a free preview of the audio article, then asks the listener to create an account to keep listening.
News website accessibility
Digital accessibility makes a news site usable by everyone, disabilities included. In Europe, the European Accessibility Act has applied since June 2025.
Embedded audio player
The embedded audio player is the widget on the article page that plays the audio version. It installs with one line of code or a CMS plugin.
Listen-through rate
The listen-through rate measures how much of an audio article is actually heard. It is the reference metric for real audio engagement.
Word-level timestamps
Word-level timestamps map every word of the text to its exact position in the audio. They power highlighting, quotes and chapters.
Audio RSS feed
An audio RSS feed is a structured file listing audio episodes. It serves both as an ingestion channel for articles and as a podcast distribution channel.
Audio monetisation
Audio monetisation covers the revenue from audio articles: advertising (pre-roll, midroll), registration wall conversion and podcast distribution.
Audio SEO
Audio SEO covers what audio does for search rankings: stronger engagement and structured data, but no indexing of the sound itself.