Apple is working towards offering its users an option of having the news read to them than reading it by themselves. This means that in no distant time, podcasts that are audio version of media publishers’ content called ‘Spoken Editions.’
The option will be found on iTunes and will be the audio version of publishers’ content that has both written form and now audio form. With that option, you can be listening to the new of your favourite website instead of having to read its content. This means you can multitask while listening to it with other things like burning it out in the gym, evening walk with the dog, cooking and many other things.
The Spoken Editions will have ‘Science,’ ‘Business’ on its webpage. For TIME magazine, their spoken edition will be called ‘The Brief.’ For Forbes, Bustle, Mic, OZY, Playboy and even TechCrunch will all have their versions for Spoken Editions.
Big publishers like Wired, have theirs located under ‘Top Spoken Editions’ as was found under ‘Top Episodes’
SpokenLayer is one company that is helping publishers make their content ready for Spoken Edition.
This is not to say that they are partners to Apple since other networks that can do such are welcome to do so. Apple on its own is working towards having its own feature that will be doing the same work for publishers.
SpokenLayer which was launched in 2012 give users the option to create audio version of their content, monetise it as well as distribute it to media establishments. Huffington Post, Forbes, Reuters, Scripps, Smithsonian and many others are using the company’s podcast service to create an audio version of their contents. After producing the audio version of it, they are then sent to iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Live365 and AudioBoom.
This audio version will also have audio ads that will generate revenue to be shared between SpokenLayer and the owner of the content.
You might not be so surprised with the transcription of text-to-speech may not be something new, what is new is the way SpokenLayer has packaged it. They have perfected a means of turning a written content into an audio content.
The need for this came with the increasing request for audio podcasting in general. People are embracing the voice computing more than ever in the latest trend. We even hear that Apple is already working on a competitor for Alexa by Amazon, meaning that more people will be exposed to Spoken Editions.
There has been steady growth of 30 percent and more annually for the podcasting. 25, 000 active podcasts have been recorded along with 12 million audio, document and video episodes in not less than 100 languages. Customers are to be exposed to 10 billion episodes of podcasts through iTunes, tvOS, and iOS devices this year.
Companies as of the moment are looking to create podcasts on daily basis and not just on weekly or monthly basis.
Spoken Editions is expected to be launched in October when we will have more update on all the publishers participating.
