Frequently Asked Questions

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Getting Started

AudioLayer is a WordPress plugin that instantly turns your written articles and blog posts into studio-quality AI narration. You publish content the way you already do, click Generate Narration, and AudioLayer generates the audio, adds a player to the post, and provides publishers with robust listener analytics. No separate production step and no audio experience required.

A JavaScript embed is coming next, letting publishers on Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, Drupal, Ghost, and effectively any other CMS deploy AudioLayer with a single snippet. If you are not on WordPress, tell us which platform you run, and we will let you know when it is ready.

Publishers, newsletters, and content platforms running article-based sites. If you publish written content on WordPress and want readers to listen while they multitask with incredibly realistic, expressive audio narration, AudioLayer is built for you.

Most text-to-speech plugins give you a listen button. AudioLayer gives you a flexible narration platform: premium ElevenLabs voices your readers can choose from, multiple languages, optional AI-generated article summaries (coming soon), listener analytics, and, on higher plans, podcast feeds and ad monetization (coming soon).

No. Narration is generated from your published text, so there is nothing to record and nothing to edit. If you can install a WordPress plugin, you can run AudioLayer.

Yes. The free AudioLayer plugin is live on WordPress.org. Create a free AudioLayer account, install the plugin, and paste your API key into the plugin settings. No credit card required.

Install the free AudioLayer plugin from WordPress.org, create a free AudioLayer account, and paste your API key into the plugin settings. Then open any post in the block editor, click Generate Narration, and publish. The Free Plan includes 10,000 words of narration every month, and no credit card is required.

Yes. AudioLayer is a hosted service, so the plugin needs an API key from your AudioLayer account before it can generate audio. Creating an account is free and requires no credit card.

AudioLayer was founded by Jarred Kirsch, previously co-founder of Searchandise Commerce, which he helped grow from 3 employees to more than 40 before its acquisition by RichRelevance. The About page has more on AudioLayer’s team.

Plans & Pricing

Yes, $0 per month. You get the WordPress plugin, one-click narration from the WordPress post editor, 10,000 words per month (roughly 70 minutes of listening time or 10 mid-size articles), one premium voice of your choice from our library of 30, English narration, one website, robust listener analytics (including views, plays, CTRs, average listen time, total listen time, and narration completion rates), and email support.

The free plan has no overage, so it cannot generate a charge. If you reach 10,000 words, narration pauses until your next month begins. If you need more narration per month, the Starter, Growth, or Business plans would be a better fit.

AudioLayer has four plans: Free ($0), Starter ($35/mo), Growth ($79/mo), and Business ($179/mo).

They differ by monthly word allowance, the number of voices and languages your listeners can choose from, and how many websites you can run. Coming soon: Growth and Business will add AI article summaries, and Business will add podcast feeds with managed RSS, the ad monetization layer, and API access.

See the full plan comparison for more details.

About ten mid-size articles, or roughly 70 minutes of narration. As a rule of thumb, 1,000 words is about 7 minutes of audio.

We size plans by words rather than articles because a 400-word news brief and a 3,000-word feature are very different jobs, and counting them the same way would either short-change you or overcharge you.

In practice, the Free Plan suits a publisher posting around two articles a week. The Starter Plan covers roughly a dozen a week. These estimates assume each article is narrated in one voice and one language.

Nothing happens automatically. Overage billing is off by default, so narration pauses when you reach your monthly allowance, and we show you two ways forward: switch overage on, or move up a plan. If you switch overage on, narration continues, and the additional words are billed at the published per-1,000-word rate, with a running total in your console. Either way, you get warnings at 80% and 100% of your allowance. The free plan has no overage option, so it can never charge you for overages.

Upgrades take effect right away. You pay only the difference in price for the days left in your current billing cycle, and your billing date stays the same.

Your new word allowance, extra voices and lower overage rate are available immediately, and the words you’ve already used this month count toward the new allowance. For example, if you’ve used 48,000 words on Starter and upgrade to Growth, you have 152,000 words left this month.

Upgrading from the Free Plan starts your paid billing cycle that day.

Downgrades take effect at the end of your current billing cycle, so you keep everything you’ve paid for until then. We don’t issue partial refunds for the rest of the cycle.

If your new plan includes fewer voices, languages or sites than you’re using, you choose which to keep when you make the change. Narrations you’ve already published keep playing.

Moving to the Free Plan works the same way, and you can cancel a scheduled downgrade any time before it takes effect.

If you need narration volume above the Business Plan or have other customization requirements, we’ll set up an Enterprise Plan to fit your exact needs.

Words, Usage & Billing

You are charged for words we turn into audio, and nothing else. Five things do that:

  • Narrating a new article
  • Regenerating a narration after edits
  • Regenerating when you change the voice or language
  • Narrating an AI article summary (coming soon)
  • Hearing a voice read your own article text

Trying voices from the library is free. You are charged only when a voice narrates your own content. And if a generation fails and produces no audio, there is no charge.

Each voice and each language you enable is its own narration, and each one counts. For example, with two voices and two languages enabled (English plus one more), one article produces three narrations: one in each of your two English voices and one in your second language. A translated narration counts the words in the translated text, which can be slightly higher or lower than the English original.

Editing is free. Adding emphasis, fixing a pronunciation, inserting a pause, or excluding a passage costs nothing, because nothing has been synthesized yet. Cost appears only when you press Preview or Regenerate.

Browsing the voice library is free. Those are pre-recorded samples, so you can listen to every voice on your plan as often as you like at no cost. The one exception is hearing a voice read your own article text, which is real narration and is charged like any other.

Replaying a preview you have already generated is also free. It is served from cache, so one synthesis means one charge, however many times you listen back.

We count actual words and never round up. Translated narrations are counted on the translated text, the words actually narrated. Rates are quoted per 1,000 words so you can compare plans at a glance, but a 1,200-word article is billed as 1,200 words, not 2,000. Your invoice shows the arithmetic so your finance team can reconstruct it.

Setup & WordPress

Setup takes three steps:

1. In WordPress, go to Plugins > Add New Plugin, search for “AudioLayer,” then install and activate it.
2. Create a free AudioLayer account and copy your API key.
3. Paste the key into the AudioLayer plugin settings.

Nothing is narrated until you choose to narrate it. When a post is ready, click Generate Narration in the AudioLayer panel of the post editor, and AudioLayer narrates it in every voice and language you have enabled.

There is no separate audio workflow for your editors to learn.

On the Free Plan, you choose one premium voice from our library of 30. On paid plans, you choose which voices and languages to offer your listeners.

Sign in to the AudioLayer Console and go to Settings > Connected Websites. Under “Copy your API key,” copy the key and paste it into the AudioLayer plugin settings in WordPress.

For security, the full key is shown only once, right after it is created. If you need it again, click Regenerate key to get a new one, then paste the new key into the plugin.

Today, AudioLayer is WordPress-native. API access on the Business plan, coming soon, will let you build your own integration.

A JavaScript embed is coming next, letting publishers on Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, Drupal, Ghost, and effectively any other CMS deploy AudioLayer with a single snippet.

Tell us which platform you run, and we will let you know when it is ready.

Yes, on the right plan. Free and Starter each cover one website. Growth covers up to two, and Business covers up to four. Your monthly word allowance works at the account level, not per site, so two sites on Growth share the same 200,000 words rather than each getting 200,000.

Send us a message through our Contact page, or email us at info@audiolayer.io. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

Voices & Languages

Like a real person, not a robot. AudioLayer uses ElevenLabs Flash v2.5 AI voice models at 192kbps, among the most realistic and expressive available today.

This is the part you have to hear rather than read about. Every article on our blog is narrated with AudioLayer. Press play on this post and judge for yourself.

One on Free, two on Starter, four on Growth, and eight on Business. On every plan, including Free, you choose your voices from our library of 30 premium English voices. On paid plans, your listeners choose which of your enabled voices they prefer.

Yes, on any plan above Free. The player lets listeners pick from the voices you have enabled.

This matters more than it sounds. With only one voice, a listener who doesn’t like it has no choice but to leave. Give them a choice, and a voice they dislike becomes a preference they can change instead of a reason to bounce, which improves the odds they press play and stay to the end.

AudioLayer supports 30 languages: Bulgarian, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

How many you can publish depends on your plan, with English counted as one of them: English only on Free, up to two languages on Starter, up to four on Growth, and up to eight on Business.

Every language is narrated by a native-speaking voice we selected for it, so a German narration sounds like a German narrator, not an English voice reading German. On any plan above Free, listeners can switch languages in the player, so a reader who would rather listen in their own language doesn’t have to leave the article.

Not yet. It is on our roadmap, and here is how we are approaching it. There are two methods worth distinguishing. Instant cloning builds a working voice from a short sample, a minute or two of clean audio, and can be set up in an afternoon. Professional cloning trains on a longer studio session and holds up better across long-form narration, where small rough edges you would never catch in a short clip become tiring across a ten-minute article. The gap between the two has narrowed considerably over the past few years, but it still shows at article length.

For publishers, the interesting part is cross-lingual. A single cloned voice can carry into other languages while keeping the speaker’s timbre and cadence, so a masthead voice stays recognizable in every market you publish in rather than becoming a different person in each region.

We will require verified consent from the voice owner before creating any clone. A presenter’s voice is part of a publication’s brand, and no one should be able to reproduce it just because they have a recording. We aren’t setting a date for cloning yet, but if a branded custom voice matters to you, send us a message on our Contact page, and we’ll factor it into the priority order.

The Listening Experience

A clean, embedded player that sits inside your article rather than floating over it. Your logo appears by default in the graphic tile on the left, so the player reads as part of your publication rather than a third-party widget dropped onto the page. You can swap that tile for a different image from the AudioLayer settings panel in WordPress. The article title sits in the player too, so a reader who has scrolled away still knows what they are listening to.

The play button pulses gently until it is pressed. Most readers have never been offered audio on an article before, and a static icon gets scrolled past without registering. The pulse is a quiet invitation, not an interruption.

Once it is playing, listeners get the controls they already know from podcast apps: skip back and forward fifteen seconds, a progress bar they can scrub, adjustable playback speed, and a share control for passing the audio on without leaving the page.

On any plan above Free, listeners can also switch voices and languages directly in the player. Someone who doesn’t love a particular narrator, or would rather listen in their native language, can change it without leaving the article. Switching to another language starts that narration from the beginning, since translated audio runs a different length. This not only improves the user experience, but it also increases listener engagement and narration completion rates.

Yes. The player is built for mobile, not squeezed onto it. It’s web-based, so your readers don’t need to install an app or sign in. It runs in the browser they already use, on iOS and Android alike.

On a narrow screen, the layout reorganizes rather than shrinking. Play, the fifteen-second skips, and the progress bar stay on the surface where a thumb can reach them. Language, voice, and speed move behind a settings control that expands when tapped. Nothing is removed. Controls a listener touches stay visible, and the ones they set once are a tap away.

That matters because people listen while multitasking. Someone on a train, in the kitchen, or walking the dog is exactly the reader your audio was made for, and the player has to work with one thumb and no thought.

Coming soon. A short AI-generated audio preview that plays before the full narration, available on Growth and above once it launches. It gives listeners a reason to keep going, which lifts completion rates. Summaries are optional per article and fully editable, so your editorial voice stays yours.

Yes, and it is one of the few accessibility improvements that does not create ongoing work.

Narration broadens who can use your content: readers with low vision, readers with dyslexia or other learning differences, anyone dealing with reading fatigue, and anyone whose hands and eyes are busy.

What makes it practical is that it adds no labor. Most accessibility work is continuous, someone writing alt text, someone checking contrast, article after article. Narration takes one click per article in the WordPress editor, with nothing to record, edit, or produce. It scales with your archive instead of competing with it.

To be straight about the limits: narration is not a substitute for an accessibility audit, and it won’t, on its own, make a site compliant with WCAG or the European Accessibility Act. It closes one specific gap, and it closes it on every article rather than the handful someone found time for.

Analytics & Distribution

AudioLayer’s analytics platform provides publishers with a robust set of ROI-tracking metrics, including views, plays, CTRs, average listen time, total listen time, narration completion rates, and time spent on-page when narration is engaged.

AudioLayer’s analytics platform is purpose-built for web publishers, so you’re always able to evaluate the performance of your entire narration campaign, as well as listener metrics at the individual article-level. Every plan, including Free, includes the full set of listener analytics.

Coming soon on the Business plan. Your narrated articles will be packaged into a podcast feed automatically, so the audio you are already producing becomes a show without a second workflow. Submit the feed once to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube, and new articles will appear as episodes from then on.

Coming soon on the Business plan. The Ad Monetization Layer will let you insert short audio ads into narrated articles and attach branded sponsorships to the player, turning listening time into inventory rather than cost.

No. Narration is an addition to the page, not a second copy of it. Search engines index your article text exactly as they do today; the audio is an extra format layered onto the same URL.

Coming soon on the Business plan. The AudioLayer API will let your developers trigger narration programmatically, retrieve the generated audio files, and pull listening data into your own reporting. It is the route to running AudioLayer outside WordPress or wiring it into a publishing workflow you already have.

Privacy & Data

No. The AudioLayer player sets no cookies, and it doesn’t use localStorage, sessionStorage, IndexedDB, or any other browser storage on your public site. Listener analytics work without storing anything on your readers’ devices.

The only browser storage in the plugin is sessionStorage inside the WordPress editor, used by logged-in editors while they work. It never reaches your public pages.

Only what we need to show you how your narration performs. Each event records your site’s hostname, the WordPress post, a random ID for that page visit, the device type (desktop, mobile, or tablet), what happened, and when. The player records five events:

  • Article view: the page loaded
  • Narration play: a reader pressed play
  • Narration progress: every 5% of the narration
  • Narration complete: the narration played to the end
  • Session end: the reader left, with time spent on the page and whether they listened

For article views, we keep only the hostname of the referring site (for example http://www.google.com), never the full address of the referring page. Country comes from the browser’s time zone, not from an IP address. The random page-visit ID disappears when the reader leaves or reloads the page, so two articles read by the same person produce two unrelated IDs.

We don’t collect names, email addresses, or precise location, and we don’t track listeners across websites. Listener analytics are kept for as long as your AudioLayer account exists. The full details are in our Privacy Policy.

We never store them. To protect against abuse, the plugin keeps a one-way hash of a visitor’s IP address on your WordPress site for 60 seconds, and AudioLayer’s servers hold the address in memory for 60 seconds without writing it to disk or to any log. Country is estimated from the browser’s time zone, never from an IP address.

Audio delivery works like any file a web page loads from another server. The narration file loads from AudioLayer’s cloud hosting, so your visitor’s browser connects to it directly and the request carries the visitor’s IP address. We set no cookies on audio requests and do not log the address.

Yes. Listener analytics are on by default, so your Console starts reporting from your first narration. To turn them off, switch off Collect listener analytics on the Privacy page of the AudioLayer plugin settings. When it’s off, the player sends no analytics at all and your narration keeps working exactly as before. Your Console won’t show listening data for the time analytics are off. Turning analytics off stops new data from being collected; it doesn’t delete data already recorded.

AudioLayer doesn’t add anything for a cookie banner to manage, because the player sets no cookies and uses no browser storage. Whether your site needs a banner depends on the other tools you run, such as analytics and advertising tags, and on where your readers are. Your own privacy advisor can confirm what applies to your site.

Yes, briefly. When a page with the player loads, your visitors’ browsers fetch the narration audio from AudioLayer’s servers, and if listener analytics are on, your site shares listening events with AudioLayer. The plugin adds suggested text to the WordPress Privacy Policy Guide (Settings > Privacy), or you’re welcome to adapt this text:

We use AudioLayer to provide audio narration of our articles. When you visit a page with the AudioLayer player, your browser loads the audio from AudioLayer’s servers. We also share anonymous listening statistics with AudioLayer, which do not include your name, email address, or IP address. AudioLayer sets no cookies. See AudioLayer’s Privacy Policy at audiolayer.io/privacy-policy.

Yes, that’s how narration is made. Your article text goes to ElevenLabs, which produces the audio. If you enable other languages, your text first goes to Anthropic, which translates it. We send your content and narration settings only, never data about your listeners, and we don’t use your content to train AI models.

Translations are produced by AI and read aloud by a native-speaking voice without human review. The translation keeps your complete text and paragraph structure, with nothing summarized, shortened, or added. Numbers, dates, currency, and units are written out the way a native narrator would say them, and the names of people, organizations, brands, and products stay as they are.

Spanish narration uses Latin American Spanish, and Portuguese uses Brazilian Portuguese. For articles where exact wording matters, such as legal, medical, or financial content, preview the translated narration before you publish it.

Have any additional questions?

Ask us directly, and we’ll get back to you. If it is a good question, we’ll add it here.

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