Newspack is thrilled to announce a partnership with Everlit — a company created to “unleash the written word” through audio. Everlit’s AI-driven text-to-audio generation tool is available for all Newspack sites and is free to use for up to five articles per month. 

Founders Evan McGee and Evan Woolley (fondly known as The Evans) met in college as members of rival a-cappella groups, which is why it’s fitting they later founded a company that brings sound to articles on the web. But, Everlit’s audio capabilities go beyond the often mundane, robotic qualities of other AI-driven audio tools out there. 

“We wanted to partner with a company that would allow our publishers to take advantage of audio in a meaningful way,” recalled our Head of Product, Katie Rethman. As the publishing industry shifts toward more audio-centric content consumption, we want to provide our publishers the tools they need to meet audience expectations.  

A pleasant, not robotic AI audio experience

When you listen to an article supported by Everlit, you feel pulled into the story as if you were listening to your favorite podcast. The sound and voice quality is pure, human, and engaging — you feel like a person is reading to you, not a robot. And you can increase audience engagement by adding their Emmy-award winning intro and outro music or record your own to set the right tone for your audio. 

Everlit supports more than 30 languages. You also have the ability to select two readers so the audio sounds more conversational. And, if you’d like to clone a voice, you have that option as well. 

Customization capabilities are important to Woolley and McGee who value the need to match audio with specific editorial styles. 

“We saw first-hand the frustration of using existing tools to engage audiences with audio. It was clear that publishers and writers needed an AI partner who cared deeply about three things: reflecting their unique editorial styles, seamless integration into their workflows, and a core focus on natural human-quality audio. Our goal is to enable anyone to easily repurpose their written content, engaging their audiences in new, immersive ways while opening up monetization opportunities and driving growth and connection.”

Evan McGee, CEO and cofounder of Everlit

Track performance metrics 

Everlit’s performance dashboard is intuitive and user-friendly, allowing you to quickly monitor and analyze the success of your audio. They present information at a high-level across all audio clips, or you can drill down to the level of an individual article. All of this helps identify the most engaging content and identify how effective your audio clips are at boosting time spent on your site.

Some of the metrics include:

• Total number of plays on all or individual audio tracks
• Average time on page for both listeners and non-listeners
• Percentage of users on a desktop, smartphone, or tablet
• The average length of time your audience spent listening overall or per article
• How many times people saw your audio vs. how many actually listened

“Everlit has played a leading role in increasing average time on page across our site. The company’s narration widget has, without a doubt, improved our story-level accessibility and engagement with an easy to use interface and lifelike voices.”

Giovanni Moujaes, product manager at inewsource

Newspack publishers can learn how to activate the Everlit plugin by reading this FAQ.

Request a demo from us if you’re interested in using Newspack.