instaread

<p>Trusted by 200+ brands and creators, Instaread Audio Player converts your WordPress articles, blog posts, and pages into natural-sounding audio and embeds an audio player on your content. The plugin is provided at no cost to publishers; Instaread operates on an ad-supported model, where revenue is generated through optional audio advertising and shared with the publisher.</p>
<p>The plugin is intended for publishers who want to add an audio version of their text content to improve accessibility and offer an alternative way to consume articles.</p>
<h4>Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Automatic text-to-speech conversion for posts, pages, and custom post types</li>
<li>Embedded audio player with waveform visualizer</li>
<li>Color and style customization to match your site’s branding</li>
<li>Voice library with multiple natural-sounding voices; voice cloning available on request</li>
<li>Site-specific pronunciation dictionary for proper nouns and brand names</li>
<li>Analytics dashboard with listener metrics</li>
<li>Audio podcast feed generation for distribution to podcast platforms</li>
<li>Playlist support for serialized content</li>
<li>Subscribe-to-listen flow for paywalled content</li>
<li>Optional ad suppression for logged-in subscribers</li>
<li>Works with standard WordPress themes</li>
<li>Compatible with major page builders (Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, Gutenberg)</li>
<li>Mobile-responsive player layout</li>
<li>Asynchronous player loading — does not block page rendering</li>
</ul>
<h4>How It Works</h4>
<ol>
<li>Install and activate the Instaread Audio Player plugin</li>
<li>Connect your site through the onboarding wizard</li>
<li>Choose your voice, customize the player appearance, and add the required ads.txt lines</li>
<li>Submit your site for approval</li>
<li>Once approved, your articles are converted to audio and the player appears on every post</li>
</ol>
<h4>Who Is This For?</h4>
<ul>
<li>News publishers who want to offer an audio version of their articles</li>
<li>Bloggers who want to make content accessible to audio-first audiences</li>
<li>Content-heavy websites looking to add audio without a separate production pipeline</li>
<li>Magazine and media sites that want an audio version of their archive</li>
</ul>
<h4>Pricing and Monetization</h4>
<p>The plugin is provided at no cost to publishers. Instaread’s revenue comes from optional audio advertising played within the audio stream; publishers receive a share of that revenue.</p>
<h3>Configuration Guide</h3>
<h4>Admin Dashboard</h4>
<p>After activation, the <strong>Instaread</strong> menu appears in the WordPress admin sidebar. All settings are managed through a locally-rendered admin interface — no iframes, no external page loads in the admin.</p>
<h4>Step 1 — Register Your Site</h4>
<p>Fill in:<br />
* <strong>Website Name</strong> — your publication name<br />
* <strong>Homepage URL</strong> — your site’s root URL (e.g. https://example.com)<br />
* <strong>Email Address</strong> — for account notifications</p>
<h4>Step 2 — Choose a Voice</h4>
<ul>
<li>Browse the voice library and click the play button to preview any voice</li>
<li>Select one or more voices — the system will alternate between them</li>
<li>Browse the available voices and choose the ones that best fit your publication</li>
</ul>
<h4>Step 3 — Configure the Player</h4>
<ul>
<li><strong>Player Design</strong>: Choose from Acoustic Player (waveform visualizer), Compact Acoustic, or Compact</li>
<li><strong>Player Color</strong>: Set the primary accent color to match your branding</li>
<li><strong>Player Label</strong>: Defaults to “Listen to this article” — customize as needed</li>
<li><strong>Waveform Colors</strong>, <strong>Timestamps Color</strong>, and <strong>Advertisement Text</strong> are available depending on design</li>
<li>A live preview updates instantly as you change settings — no need to save first</li>
</ul>
<h4>Step 4 — Set Player Position</h4>
<ul>
<li><strong>Default Position</strong> (recommended): Player is injected above <code>.entry-content</code> automatically</li>
<li><strong>Custom Position</strong>: Enter a CSS selector (e.g. <code>.article-body</code>) and choose above or below</li>
</ul>
<h4>Step 5 — Submit for Approval</h4>
<p>Click <strong>Submit for Approval</strong>. You will be taken to a confirmation screen that shows:<br />
* Your submission status (pending <span aria-hidden="true" class="wp-exclude-emoji">→</span> accepted)<br />
* The <strong>ads.txt content</strong> you must add to your domain</p>
<h4>Step 6 — Add ads.txt</h4>
<p>Instaread requires ads.txt entries to serve audio ads. Add the provided lines to your domain’s <code>/ads.txt</code> file. You can:<br />
* Edit the file manually at <code>https://yourdomain.com/ads.txt</code><br />
* Use the free <strong>Ads.txt Manager</strong> WordPress plugin (recommended)</p>
<p>The confirmation screen shows a live verification indicator — green when detected correctly.</p>
<h4>Step 7 — Approval and Go-Live</h4>
<p>Once Instaread verifies your ads.txt and approves your site, audio generation begins automatically. New posts are converted within minutes of publishing. Your full archive is also converted at no additional cost.</p>
<p>Approval typically happens within a few hours of submission. After approval, additional settings pages unlock in the admin sidebar:<br />
* <strong>Voice Selection</strong> — change or add voices<br />
* <strong>Audio Player</strong> — update player design and colors<br />
* <strong>Position</strong> — change player placement<br />
* <strong>Manage Posts</strong> — include/exclude posts by date or category<br />
* <strong>Pronunciation</strong> — add custom pronunciations for brand names or proper nouns<br />
* <strong>Ads</strong> — view and copy your ads.txt configuration<br />
* <strong>Analytics</strong> — view listener metrics (plays, duration, geography)</p>
<h3>External Services</h3>
<p>Instaread Audio Player connects to external services operated by Instaread (https://instaread.co).<br />
By installing this plugin, you agree to the Instaread Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.</p>
<p>This plugin connects to Instaread’s external audio service. Instaread’s hosted service performs article-to-audio processing, audio hosting, player delivery, ad serving, analytics, and revenue-share reporting. These functions are not performed locally by the WordPress plugin.</p>
<p>When enabled by the site administrator, the plugin may send article URLs, article text, site domain, and basic playback/ad event data to Instaread for the purpose of generating audio, serving the audio player, measuring usage, and supporting ad monetization.</p>
<p>Use of the Instaread service is subject to Instaread’s Terms of Use (https://instaread.co/terms) and Privacy Policy (https://instaread.co/privacy).</p>
<p>Instaread does not use your content to train AI models. You retain all intellectual property rights.</p>


Instaread Audio Player — Text-to-Speech & Article-to-Audio

Convert articles, blog posts, and pages into natural-sounding audio. Improves accessibility and supports optional audio advertising.

DAEXT

<p>Real Voice is a text-to-speech plugin for WordPress that supports the Web Speech API, Google Text-to-Speech AI, and Azure Text to speech.</p>
<h3>Pro Version</h3>
<p>A <a href="https://daext.com/real-voice/" rel="nofollow ugc">Pro version of Real Voice</a> is now available on our website. This upgraded edition includes more text-to-speech converters (other integrations for Amazon Polly and ElevenLabs are available), the ability to make the audio files downloadable by the visitors, customizable audio player placement using a shortcode, and more.</p>
<h3>Key Features</h3>
<h4>Automatically Add the Audio Player</h4>
<p>The plugin automatically adds an audio player at the beginning of the articles. Note that from the plugin options, you can configure post types on which the audio player should be displayed.</p>
<h4>Manually Generate the Audio Files</h4>
<p>We have included a dedicated post sidebar section where you can create a new audio version of the post, update the existing audio version, or delete the audio data.</p>
<p>The website administrator, the editor, or other authorized users can at any time access to this area.</p>
<h4>Monitor the Presence and State of the Audio Files</h4>
<p>The plugin adds a new column named “Audio File” to the posts menu (and to the admin menu of all the other enabled post types). Here, you can verify if a specific post has its related audio version and if this version is up to date with the post.</p>
<h4>Customizable HTML Audio Player</h4>
<p>The plugin generates a custom audio player built with HTML and the browser API. You can customize the style of the player (color, typography, shadows, etc.) using the plugin options.</p>
<h4>Responsive Audio Player</h4>
<p>The audio player is responsive, and you can specify the breakpoint used to switch from the desktop to the mobile version with a dedicated option.</p>
<h4>Supports Plain Text and SSML</h4>
<p>You can generate the audio version of an article from plain text or SSML.</p>
<p>In the case of SSML, the supported tags vary depending on the selected text-to-speech converter.</p>
<h4>Add Additional Text Before or After the Player</h4>
<p>Use the dedicated options to configure the message displayed before (or after) the player. You can set messages like “Listen to this article”, “This article is also available in an audio format”, etc.</p>
<h4>Optionally Read the Post Title</h4>
<p>Do you want to use the post title as the first synthesized sentence? Then, use the dedicated settings option to apply this behavior.</p>
<h3>Knowledge Base</h3>
<p>Get started with the plugin or explore the advanced features with the documentation available in the <a href="https://daext.com/kb-category/real-voice/" rel="nofollow ugc">Knowledge Base</a>.</p>
<h3>This plugin can optionally use paid third-party services</h3>
<p>This plugin can optionally use third-party services to perform the text-to-speech conversion. If you configure one of these services and perform a text-to-speech conversion using the tools provided by the plugin, the third-party service will charge you according to their terms.</p>
<h4>When the third-party service “Text-to-Speech AI” from Google Cloud is enabled</h4>
<p>The plugin will use the <a href="https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/" rel="nofollow ugc">Text-to-Speech AI from Google Cloud</a> third-party service to perform the text-to-speech conversion when both these conditions are met:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Google Cloud Text-to-Speech AI</strong> is selected with the <strong>Text-to-speech Converter</strong> option available in the <strong>Text-to-Speech -> General</strong> section of the plugin.</li>
<li>A valid key is provided in the <strong>Google Cloud Secret Access Key</strong> option available in the <strong>Text-to-Speech -> Google Cloud Text-to-Speech AI</strong> section of the plugin options.</li>
</ul>
<p>The Terms of Service of the Google Cloud Platform are available in the link below:</p>
<p><a href="https://cloud.google.com/terms" rel="nofollow ugc">https://cloud.google.com/terms</a></p>
<h4>When the third-party service “Text to speech” from Microsoft Azure is enabled</h4>
<p>The plugin will use the <a href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/ai-services/text-to-speech" rel="nofollow ugc">Text to speech from Microsoft Azure</a> third-party service to perform the text-to-speech conversion when both these conditions are met:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Azure Text to Speech (Cloud service)</strong> is selected with the <strong>Text-to-speech Converter</strong> option available in the <strong>Text-to-Speech -> General</strong> section of the plugin.</li>
<li>A valid key is provided in the <strong>Azure Speech Resource Key</strong> option available in the <strong>Text-to-Speech -> Azure Text-to-speech</strong> of the plugin options.</li>
</ul>
<p>Legal information for Text to speech by Microsoft Azure:</p>
<p><a href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/" rel="nofollow ugc">https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/</a></p>
<h4>When the plugin performs a text-to-speech conversion</h4>
<p>In the contexts described below, the plugin performs a text-to-speech conversion. Note that with a third-party service enabled, this involves sending text/SSML to the third-party service API (on a remote server) to retrieve the audio data.</p>
<p>Text-to-speech conversions are performed when you click the <strong>Generate file</strong> button in the <strong>Audio File</strong> post sidebar section. For <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/" rel="ugc">Classic Editor</a> users, the text-to-speech conversions are performed when you click the <strong>Generate file</strong> button in the <strong>Audio File</strong> meta box.</p>
<h4>Accessing the plugin options</h4>
<p>You can access the plugin options anytime from the <strong>Real Voice</strong> menu on your WordPress dashboard. Please note that this menu is available only for WordPress users who own the <a href="https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/roles-and-capabilities/#manage_options" rel="ugc">manage_options</a> capability.</p>
<h4>Disclaimer</h4>
<p>To the extent permissible under applicable laws, in no event shall DAEXT di A. D. (the company that developed this plugin) or its employees be liable to you for problems associated with using the third-party services supported by this plugin (E.g., Unexpected charges, violations of the third-party terms of services, etc.).</p>
<p>We recommend that you enable the third-party services included in this plugin only under the following conditions:</p>
<ul>
<li>We do not guarantee an implementation free of errors, and this WordPress plugin (both in terms of features and codebase) should be evaluated by a professional before being configured to use a third-party service.</li>
<li>Your site is secure, and only authorized users can access the WordPress administrative pages where the text-to-speech conversion is performed or configured.</li>
<li>The third-party service is configured by a professional.</li>
<li>This WordPress plugin is configured by a professional.</li>
<li>The costs for the use of third-party services are constantly monitored by a professional.</li>
<li>You can afford the costs associated with the use of a third-party service.</li>
</ul>


Real Voice – Text to Speech

Real Voice is a text-to-speech plugin for WordPress that supports the Web Speech API, Google Text-to-Speech AI, and Azure Text to speech.

Instaread Audio Player — Text-to-Speech & Article-to-Audio vs Real Voice – Text to Speech