Adam Greenwell

<p>ListenUp is a powerful WordPress plugin that adds text-to-speech functionality to your posts and pages. With just a few clicks, you can generate high-quality audio versions of your content using Murf.ai’s advanced AI voices.</p>
<h4>Key Features</h4>
<ul>
<li><strong>Easy Audio Generation</strong>: Generate audio for any post or page with a simple click</li>
<li><strong>Murf.ai Integration</strong>: Uses professional AI voices for natural-sounding audio</li>
<li><strong>Gen2 API Controls</strong>: Tune reusable Murf audio with locale, format, response mode, duration, timing metadata, speed, pitch and pauses</li>
<li><strong>No FFmpeg Required</strong>: Ideal for hosting environments where FFmpeg is not available or restricted</li>
<li><strong>Smart Caching</strong>: Audio files are cached locally to save API credits</li>
<li><strong>Hands-Off Generation</strong>: Queue audio automatically when content is published and backfill recent posts on a schedule</li>
<li><strong>Intelligent Chunking</strong>: Long content is automatically broken into manageable chunks</li>
<li><strong>Seamless Playback</strong>: Multiple audio chunks play continuously without interruption</li>
<li><strong>Leech Protection</strong>: Secure audio delivery prevents unauthorized direct file access and hotlinking</li>
<li><strong>Download Control</strong>: Restrict downloads to logged-in users or disable downloads entirely</li>
<li><strong>Flexible Placement</strong>: Choose where to display the audio player (before/after content)</li>
<li><strong>Shortcode Support</strong>: Use [listenup] shortcode to place players anywhere</li>
<li><strong>Accessibility First</strong>: WCAG-compliant audio player with keyboard navigation</li>
<li><strong>Mobile Responsive</strong>: Works perfectly on all devices</li>
<li><strong>Admin-Friendly</strong>: Simple settings page with clear instructions</li>
</ul>
<h4>How It Works</h4>
<ol>
<li><strong>Setup</strong>: Enter your Murf.ai API key in the plugin settings</li>
<li><strong>Generate</strong>: Use the meta box on any post/page, or enable background generation on publish</li>
<li><strong>Display</strong>: Audio players appear automatically or via shortcode</li>
<li><strong>Listen</strong>: Visitors can play, pause, and download audio content</li>
</ol>
<h4>Advanced Features</h4>
<p><strong>Content Chunking</strong>: For posts that exceed Murf.ai’s API limits, content is automatically broken into smaller chunks. Each chunk generates a separate audio file, but the frontend player seamlessly plays all chunks in sequence without interruption.</p>
<p><strong>Audio Concatenation</strong>: When downloading audio content that has been chunked, the plugin automatically concatenates supported stream-friendly formats into a single file, so listeners do not have to manage separate chunks.</p>
<p><strong>Bulk Cloud Migration</strong>: Upload existing local-only audio files to configured cloud storage from the Audio Library without regenerating audio. Large backlogs run in small browser-safe batches, track remaining work by post, and upload the canonical playable audio file instead of internal chunk files.</p>
<p><strong>Murf Gen2 Controls</strong>: Choose URL or direct base64 responses, set single-file target durations, request word timing metadata, tune speed/pitch/variation, and use <code>[pause 1s]</code> tags in content or pre-roll scripts. ListenUp still caches generated files locally so audio is reused instead of regenerated on every play.</p>
<p><strong>No FFmpeg Dependency</strong>: Unlike many audio plugins, ListenUp doesn’t require FFmpeg, making it perfect for shared hosting environments, managed WordPress hosts, or any situation where FFmpeg is not available or restricted.</p>
<p><strong>Leech Protection</strong>: Audio files are served through a secure PHP proxy with cache-safe per-file tokens, preventing unauthorized direct access and hotlinking without embedding expiring nonces in cached article HTML. All audio is delivered via WordPress AJAX endpoints with proper HTTP range request support for smooth seeking. This server-agnostic solution works on Apache, Nginx, IIS, and any PHP-capable server without requiring special server configuration.</p>
<h4>Perfect For</h4>
<ul>
<li>Bloggers who want to offer audio versions of their posts</li>
<li>Content creators looking to improve accessibility</li>
<li>Websites targeting mobile users who prefer audio content</li>
<li>Educational sites with long-form content</li>
<li>News sites wanting to offer audio news</li>
</ul>
<h4>Accessibility Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Full keyboard navigation support</li>
<li>Screen reader compatible</li>
<li>High contrast mode support</li>
<li>Reduced motion support</li>
<li>Proper ARIA labels and descriptions</li>
</ul>
<h3>External Services</h3>
<p>This plugin integrates with external services to provide text-to-speech functionality and optional cloud storage capabilities.</p>
<p><strong>Murf.ai API</strong><br />
This plugin uses Murf.ai’s text-to-speech API to generate high-quality audio content from your post and page text.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Purpose</strong>: Generates high-quality audio from text content using professional AI voices</li>
<li><strong>Data Sent</strong>: Post/page text content, selected voice ID, locale, voice style preferences, speech generation settings, response mode, optional target duration, optional word timing request, pronunciation dictionary rules (if configured)</li>
<li><strong>When Sent</strong>: Only when audio generation is requested manually, queued automatically on publish, processed by the recurring backfill job, or when generating pre-roll audio through the plugin settings</li>
<li><strong>Terms of Service</strong>: https://murf.ai/terms-of-service</li>
<li><strong>Privacy Policy</strong>: https://murf.ai/privacy-policy</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Optional Cloud Storage Services</strong><br />
This plugin optionally supports uploading audio files to cloud storage services (Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Cloudflare R2) to reduce bandwidth usage on your web server. This feature is completely optional and disabled by default. No data is sent to these services unless you explicitly configure and enable cloud storage in the plugin settings.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Amazon S3</strong>: https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/</li>
<li><strong>Google Cloud Storage</strong>: https://cloud.google.com/terms/</li>
<li><strong>Cloudflare R2</strong>: https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/</li>
</ul>
<h3>Support</h3>
<p>For support, please visit the plugin’s support forum or contact the developer.</p>
<h3>Privacy Policy</h3>
<p>This plugin does not collect or store any personal data. Audio files are cached locally on your server. The plugin only communicates with Murf.ai’s API when audio generation is requested manually, through enabled automation, or when generating pre-roll audio from plugin settings.</p>


ListenUp

Add "read this to me" functionality to your WordPress posts using Murf.ai text-to-speech technology.

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.

ListenUp vs Real Voice – Text to Speech