Introducing Audio Articles: A New Service for Subscribers of Le Monde Powered by Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services.

Le Monde, the media pioneer of digital transition

With over 48 million monthly visits on three separate applications - Info en continu, Le Journal, La Matinale-, Le Monde is the French leader in news applications both in terms of audience and traffic.

As a digital transition pioneer, Le Monde is continually innovating to develop its offer and propose new services of high-quality content. As Deputy Editor Emmanuelle Chevallereau explains, “the objective is to attract new subscribers, but also to keep them.”

Younger subscribers are very much a specific target. Julie Lelievre, Assistant Audience Manager, is happy to report that ”the audience increased considerably during the COVID-related confinement period and continues to grow. Le Monde is present on social media for free and adapts its formats to attract young readers in search of a reliable, accessible, and quality news source. The results speak for themselves, the average age of subscribers is consistently dropping which is a very good sign.” Lou Grasser, Product and Marketing manager at Le Monde, adds that ”in 2021, 50% of our new subscribers were under 34 years of age, and the trend continues.”

The latest innovation: articles available on audio

Content is increasingly being consumed at intervals and while people are on the move, in public transport, while working out or doing domestic chores. According to the editor, “readers who unsubscribe generally say they no longer have time to read a newspaper. We wondered if we could regain their loyalty by giving them the option of listening to Le Monde rather than reading it? That is the solution we came up with to retain our subscribers by adapting to their new ways of consuming news. However, we had to find an audio solution whose sound quality was equal to the high editorial quality of the paper.”

Consequently, the paper’s IT teams turned to the text-to-speech solutions available on the market. After an in-depth study, they came to the conclusion that while some solutions were interesting from a technical point of view, the voices were too alike, and it was not possible to change them. The teams at Le Monde were prepared to use artificial intelligence but synthetic voices create distance with the article and are distracting for the listener. 

In addition, they had another problem to deal with during the testing phase of certain text-to-speech solutions: Le Monde has a specific, complex writing style, characterized by long, highly punctuated sentences, with lots of quotes. The AI in the solutions tested was not able to reproduce the fluidity and rhythm of the writing. The software suppliers suggested changes to the style of the articles in order to obtain better audio results, but this was obviously out of the question for Le Monde! 

As Le Monde was already using Microsoft solutions in other areas, the IT teams also checked out the Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services solution, and in particular its text-to-speech function. They were impressed with the quality of the results from the very first try-out.

The myriad advantages of the Microsoft Azure Speech text-to-speech capabilities 

One of the main points in favor of this solution is the possibility of integrating new voices to the system. Sacha Morard, CTO at Le Monde tells us, ”We were able to test the solution straight away, without needing any technical skills, and we were able to record our own voices which reassured us as to the quality of the audio”. Emmanuelle Chevallereau adds “So, we were able to embody the voices of Le Monde, if you will, and create an audio signature for the paper.”

Microsoft Azure Speech solution also takes the literary style of Le Monde into account. The actors recorded a basic corpus supplied by Microsoft as well as 400 sentences taken from articles in Le Monde so that the algorithm could integrate the full breadth of the paper’s writing style. The final audio, generated by AI, was impressive, with no loss in quality.

Sacha Morard explains “we greatly appreciated the relationship we developed with the teams at Microsoft and all the direct access we had. We were able to give them regular feedback and outline our needs easily. They made themselves available and provided us with solutions that reached the level of quality we were looking for.” Julie Lelievre remembers ”while testing the initial recordings, we realized the listener might get tired of hearing just one voice. We then had to integrate a man’s voice and a woman’s voice for each piece, except for interviews, editorials, and some specific articles. This was easily done and now each article alternates between a female and a male voice.”

Emmanuelle Chevallereau adds that “we had to improve the pronunciation of some words and some liaisons and subtleties specific to the French language, but also the in-house pronunciation of certain words, and, in doing so, enriched the corpus with words and phrases for the technology to learn, which it did. Over a 2-month period, 20 articles were generated automatically in audio format every day without being broadcasted to our subscribers. A speech expert listened to them and corrected certain words phonetically to adjust them perfectly to the demands of the French language as some words can be written the same but pronounced quite differently.” The attention and responsiveness of the developers at Microsoft made it possible to improve the audio quality of the articles to a great extent. Obviously, the improvements carried out for Le Monde also benefit all the other users of Azure Speech’s text-to-speech capabilities in French.

An initial launch with La Matinale du Monde

Le Monde chose to use its La Matinale du Monde app that proposes a selection of 20 articles every morning in order to launch the new service. From October 2022 onwards, these 20 articles were generated and made available in audio format.

The audio article includes a musical jingle, chosen randomly by the algorithm, and features the headline, the introduction, the writer and the article. In order to adapt to the format, the subheadings and anything in brackets was excluded. A simple and intuitive interface allows subscribers to set up the app and exclude certain articles, but manual actions are kept to a minimum. When the new feature was launched, a pop-up appeared so that users could provide feedback. 

The feedback was extremely positive from a qualitative and quantitative point of view. Emmanuelle Chevallereau admits that “subscribers had been waiting for a feature like this.” Subscribers listen to an average of 9 minutes a day, which translates to four articles. The completion rate is excellent with 70% of the article read on average, which is a similar result to that of the podcasts, proving that subscribers really appreciate this ‘product’ and its quality. Over one million articles have been listened to in four months by subscribers alone. The extent of content market penetration is all the more impressive given that all this happened without a huge effort or investment. 

The availability of audio articles has become a powerful argument in favor of subscription. Furthermore, the rate of subscription cancellation has notably slowed down.

The next step

The tryout phase with La Matinale has proven to be quite successful and has attracted a bigger audience. The availability of audio articles is convincing certain users to subscribe to be able to access this feature. Emmanuelle Chevallereau confirms that “it allows us to fulfil our objective of providing quality news to people where they live and increase the loyalty of our audience.”

Sacha Morard adds that “this tryout also showed that we can easily ‘industrialize’ audio versions of articles quite quickly and without any extra tech knowhow.” It has therefore been decided to extend audio articles to the entire paper, which means up to 100 articles a day. The only ones not included are articles that include a high volume of maps or graphics.

The teams are convinced that “we will have no problem retaining our subscribers if we provide them with a quality service that satisfies current needs and habits, while retaining the editorial excellence that is crucial to the DNA of Le Monde. And we are sure to gain new subscribers too!”

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