High-quality, natural audio: listen to SCMP articles with improved narration

The South China Morning Post relaunched its "listen to article" text-to-speech feature, replacing external providers with a proprietary in-house AI platform built over several months. The feature has been rolled out across all SCMP products, including SCMP Plus and the student publication Young Post, and is available to all SCMP subscribers.

High-quality, natural audio: listen to SCMP articles with improved narration The South China Morning Post has relaunched its text-to-speech feature, leveraging next-generation AI models The South China Morning Post has relaunched its “listen to article” text-to-speech feature, taking advantage of improved artificial intelligence AI models to provide subscribers more compelling and natural narration. Audio functionality has also been added to SCMP Plus, our premium reader product, letting readers listen to eligible Plus articles. The previous SCMP audio feature was launched several years ago, but with AI models rapidly improving every few months, the decision was made to rebuild the entire text-to-speech platform and replace external providers with a proprietary solution. We also took on board reader comments, which gave us invaluable insight into where improvements could be made. The cross-team project – which spanned several months – set out to enhance voice narration quality and technical performance, including intonation for easier listening. The result is an integrated, in-house AI text-to-speech platform which provides custom, scalable, high-quality voice synthesis and article narration. Along with SCMP Plus, the text-to-speech feature has been rolled out across all SCMP products, including our student publication Young Post. The much-improved feature now lets all SCMP subscribers keep up with our journalism on the go, whether it’s catching up with headlines while commuting or enjoying the latest opinion pieces, totally screen free.