Enhancing the content experience with streamlined audio content creation powered by GAIA Voice

Published: 13:50, 11 February 2025

A year after embarking on a digital transformation to better serve its internal teams and enhance the reader experience across its digital and print formats, a prominent UK current affairs Publisher continued to pursue opportunities to improve the audience experience. 

Building on the success of its newly launched website and digital app, chief among these opportunities was to expand its content format offerings. Taking into account indicators that audio content was becoming increasingly popular with its audience, and spurred on by the rapid growth of its podcast content, the Publisher sought to add audio narrations of all its written content.

A key objective for the Publisher was to find the most efficient way to add audio narration capabilities while keeping quality at the level subscribers expected. Specifically, the Publisher strived to avoid editors having to work across multiple systems to generate audio files, and for the management of the created audio files to become a burden.

Effortless integration for enhanced engagement

As existing users of the Glide CMS platform, a key component of the Publisher’s digital transformation, it was effortless for them to turn on the system’s AI Assistant feature, GAIA. A native suite of AI and ML features built on AWS Bedrock, GAIA includes a text-to-speech service, GAIA Voice, that can automatically generate audio files from text content. Interacting directly with AWS Polly, GAIA Voice removes workflow and admin steps while enabling content creators to instantly create audio versions of its content in their preferred language and dialect.

GAIA Voice proved to be an ideal solution for the Publisher on multiple fronts. 

Having the connections to the audio service, as well as the ability to manage the files associated with the article available in the Glide CMS out of the box removed a significant amount of development work in the setup phase and eliminated any requirement for editors to move and append files or regenerate files any time an article is updated, all things that can make audio narration complex and tricky to handle. 

Depending on the config chosen by the Publisher’s admins, their editors now had the option to autogenerate audio files to accompany all articles by default – further streamlining the content creation process while enhancing the audience experience. To deselect articles as not needing audio was a one-click decision during the content creation phase.

Management of the text-to-voice structure within the Glide CMS infrastructure meant the Publisher’s product team and development partner could focus wholly on the audience experience, including where to place the player as well as other aesthetic and user-targeted work.

A key feature for the Publisher is the wide choice of voice styles and languages as well as gender offered by GAIA Voice, plus the ability for the Publisher’s editorial team to browse and select the voice gender, style, and tone to best suit different article types. For example, an article dealing with a topic of some gravity could be ‘voiced’ by a somber and more serious voice. Conversely, an upbeat and entertaining piece could have a much lighter tone applied to it in the applicable voice version.

As the Publisher’s brand continues to grow, there is an expectation to deliver content in every type of channel, an expectation that is now easily met for audio listening. While the immediate release of the new features to audiences placed the audio files alongside the written text, it has opened the pathway for audio files to be extracted and played in separate channels, growing the product offering. The rapid expansion of GAIA Voice’s underlying services has also brought into reach the ability to create content and listener experiences in different languages. 

Further, with this new content capability comes greater commercial options, opening a new revenue stream for the Publisher’s commercial team. 

GAIA Voice is one of the many AI-driven tools available in the GAIA toolset. To learn more about GAIA's text, image generation, language and audio tools, connect with a Glide product specialist.