Adding audio to your app

Audio Player

Pugpig Publish features a lightweight, easily-accessible audio player which can be used for presenting audio versions of your content. These can be supplementary to the content, podcast-style readings of your content or spoken-word versions generated by our text-to-speech engine, detailed below. 

The player is accessible via an icon in the app toolbar, this icon only shows up if there is audio available. Each unique audio file is shown in the playlist, allowing users to jump right into the content they're looking for, provided your audio content is created on an article-by-article basis. 

If you currently have an app live with us without any audio functionality, you may need to submit an update to enable it. Pop a mail to [e-mail] to get the ball rolling. 

Text to Speech

We can rapidly produce audio versions of your content which users can access within the app. This is accomplished using machine learning technology built into our distribution server. 

We've made it so that you can try out this tech before getting it hooked up to your app. Here's how. 

To turn this functionality on for an article in your feed, open distribution and select content feed under content sources in the left hand menu. Then, select the issue containing the content you want to verbalise by clicking on its name in the title column. 

The subsequent screen lists all of the content within that issue in the order it appears in the issue. Scroll over to the right to see the MP3 column. Clicking the Create Article MP3 button will do precisely what you think it does, there could be a slight time delay while the content is processed, especially if it's quite lengthy. If the preview MP3 player underneath the button is still showing the duration as 0:00, refresh the page and check again. 

 

You can use the preview player to listen to your content and see how it sounds. We suggest checking any articles that have strange formatting or contain words or names that have unusual pronunciation. 

If you like what you hear, let us know and we'll get cracking on automating the process so that all articles are processed on upload and appear seamlessly in your app. Note that it may require a new version of your app to be submitted to the store for the audio player UI elements to appear.

Finally, the technology we're using for this is regularly being improved, while this won't require any further integration on your side, you might notice slight changes to the sound of your audio versions over time.