USA TODAY taps into Azure Text-to-Speech to naturally read premium articles aloud

As USA TODAY celebrates its 40-year anniversary this year, the product team is expanding its subscriber experiences with voice. USA TODAY app subscribers can listen to premium articles with “Hear This Story”, powered by Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Text-to-Speech. The road to this feature launching on USA TODAY started with the Gannett product team exploring different competitive AI solutions including Azure. For the end user, the team required natural synthesis of news and sports articles, in addition to the ability to handle obscure names and towns, a common challenge found in broadcast media.

“Listening to content is becoming more commonplace as people are too busy to sit down and read a story. They’re working, in the kitchen, riding on the train, or driving. We realized we could provide a benefit to our users by allowing them to hear the stories that we are writing.”

Kevin Goff, Principal Product Manager, Gannett

Gannett’s 100+ year success in media and technology includes flagship news brand USA TODAY, which celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2022. The national publication consistently tops the print circulation rankings, with loyal readers hooked by the design aesthetics, bite-size data nuggets, and all things news, money, sports, and life.

“As USA TODAY celebrates its 40-year anniversary this year, we continue looking ahead at how to innovate products that benefit our subscribers,” says Kevin Goff, Principal Product Manager, Gannett.

Subscriber innovation

The USA TODAY experience now features an E-edition, websites, mobile apps, ad-free access, podcasts, and more. With over 1.75 million digital subscribers as of Q1 2022, the Gannett product team is continuously testing new features to benefit their customers.

“Listening to content is becoming more commonplace as people are too busy to sit down and read a story,” Goff says. “They’re working, in the kitchen, riding on the train, or driving. They don’t necessarily want to watch a video summarizing an article either. We realized we could provide a benefit to our users by allowing them to hear the stories that we are writing.”

Introducing “Hear this story”

Now, in the USA TODAY ‘s News and Sports+ Apps, in addition to the website, subscribers can listen to premium articles with “Hear This Story” powered by Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Text-to-Speech.

The road to this feature launching on USA TODAY started with Goff’s team exploring different competitive AI solutions including Azure. For the end user, the team required natural synthesis of news and sports articles, in addition to the ability to handle obscure names and towns, a common challenge found in broadcast media.

“I was surprised at the accuracy of the Azure Text-to-Speech engine and voices, especially the pronunciation in different locales,” Goff says. “We fully expected that we’d have to train the product on how to pronounce Baraga [County, Michigan] but the voice got it perfectly.”

Newsroom and workflow automation

On the operational side, the product team wanted a quick way to enable a content reader on subscriber articles without distracting editors in the newsroom. “We take the text of the articles as they're published and pass that through Azure Text-to-Speech to produce a file that we then move to our network that allows the playback. Microsoft Teams and Power Automate are helping us manage that workflow.”

Learn more about USA TODAY and Gannett Co., Inc.

“I was surprised at the accuracy of the Azure Text-to-Speech engine and voices, especially the pronunciation in different locales. We fully expected that we’d have to train the product on how to pronounce Baraga [County, Michigan] but the voice got it perfectly.”

Kevin Goff, Principal Product Manager, Gannett