Ears to the Ground

By: Rich Kane

In a world where newspaper stories can no longer be confined to the printed page, and when editors are constantly looking for new ways to tell those stories—whether through slideshows, video, listicles, or intriguing new immersive technologies like the Oculus Rift—one content delivery method is often forgotten.

Audio.

SpokenLayer, a company that provides audio narration for written articles, is hoping to remind you about this platform. Launched two years ago, it’s the brainchild of Will Mayo, an engineer who came up with the concept as a way of coping with his dyslexia.

“I was finishing my engineering degree, and I thought, why can’t I listen to these books instead of read them?” he said.

Initially birthed as an iPhone app, Mayo soon realized that his idea would function best by empowering publishers to reach their audience on mobile devices, so he started building the current platform, which takes a text story and turns it into something digital and portable. An audio experience, Mayo calls it.

These aren’t podcasts, he makes clear. Instead, SpokenLayer is designed to produce shorter, compelling segments that can be heard in small groups at a time.

“Podcasts never really worked within other media sites because they were too long or irrelevant,” Mayo said. “Our design is that once you start listening to one story that leads you into another. It’s a much more personalized, radio feel.”

According to Mayo, while video integration on newspaper websites has been increasing, the problem with video— and reading a story, for that matter—is that they demand a user’s full attention.

“Reading and video are both whole body experiences,” he said. “You can’t really be doing anything else, but with audio, you can be doing lots of other things, and brands are getting excited about that. People are starting to get tired of looking at their screen all day.”

Another attraction is SpokenLayer’s quick text-to-audio turnaround time—as fast as one hour.

“We have a very large pool of freelance voiceover artists we go to who produce 40 to 50 stories a day,” Mayo said. “Every client we have has increased the amount of content they want to turn into audio, and their listenership grows every month once they add audio. If the text content has a voice, we give it a voice people can actually listen to.”

So far, SpokenLayer’s client list is a mix of magazine websites like Time, Smithsonian and Fast Company, with more going live in the coming months. There are no newspaper deals lined up yet, but Mayo envisions taking SpokenLayer to all levels of print media.

“We want to engage users in their car, on the subway, anywhere we can create a great experience for publishers interesting in reaching their audience.”

For more information, go to spokenlayer.com.