News Corp Australia has rolled out text-to-speech functionality across its major mastheads, giving audiences the option to listen to articles as well as read them.
The new “Listen to this article” feature is live on both web and app for The Australian, News.com.au, The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, The Courier-Mail, The Advertiser, and regional titles including The Mercury, NT News, Cairns Post, Gold Coast Bulletin, Toowoomba Chronicle, Townsville Bulletin, Geelong Advertiser, The Weekly Times, and CODE Sports.
The AI-powered tool enables thousands of articles each week across categories such as news, sport, business, entertainment, opinion, health, and education to be consumed in audio form.
Rod Savage
The voices are modelled on journalists from News Corp’s newsrooms, created in partnership with text-to-speech company BeyondWords.
The tech allows users to set playback speed, skip forwards or backwards by paragraph, and continue listening on mobile while navigating away from the article.
Rod Savage, News Corp Australia’s Director of Newsroom Innovation, led the project and said: “We are always looking for new ways for audiences to consume our content.
“The ability to use AI technology to offer brand-specific voices of journalists – which sound remarkably realistic – and automatically enable audio for thousands of our articles will change how our audience connects with our content.
“After a successful smaller scale trial for the past year on The Australian, we’re looking forward to learning what our broader audience thinks. We believe our vision for future functions and upgrades is truly compelling and will excite our audience.”