BeyondWords – AI audio for publishers

Turn WordPress articles into audio as you publish, with tools for distribution, monetization, and analytics.

Let audiences listen to your articles

BeyondWords turns selected WordPress posts and pages into audio automatically.

Your editors keep working in WordPress. BeyondWords generates the audio, adds a customizable player, and automatically update audio when articles changes.

Choose from premade voices, generate a voice from a prompt, or create Instant and Professional voice clones. Voices are powered by ElevenLabs.

What you can do

• Choose which posts and pages become audio
• Create full audio articles or shorter audio summaries
• Add a customizable player with automatic word highlighting
• Correct pronunciations and review audio before publishing
• Build playlists and podcast feeds
• Monetize listening through advertising and subscriptions
• Measure plays, engagement, listening time, and completion

Distribute in WordPress and beyond

Embed audio in your articles, create playlists, publish podcast feeds to services such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts, share audio via URL, or share and download audio files.

Built for WordPress workflows

Set defaults for your publication, then override them on individual posts.

BeyondWords can regenerate audio when an article changes. You can also use WordPress bulk actions to generate audio for existing articles.

For page-builder setups such as Elementor, Magic Embed provides an alternative to the standard REST API integration.

Monetize listening

Make audio a subscriber benefit with full, ad-free listening, while using previews or ad-supported audio to encourage other readers to register or subscribe.

Upload your own audio ads or connect your existing ad server through VAST, the common standard for audio advertising.

What publishers say

“We’ve had great customer feedback and the team have been quick to make adjustments based on our suggestions.”

Kenneth Creamer, Creamer Media

Get started

Book a demo and we’ll help you choose the right setup, voices, player, and monetization options for your publication.

Book a demo

For questions or support, email support@beyondwords.io.

1. Install and activate the BeyondWords plugin.
2. Connect it to your BeyondWords project.
3. Choose which posts and pages should become audio.
4. Set your default voice and player preferences.
5. Publish as usual.

Can I choose which articles become audio?

Yes. Set defaults for posts and pages, then change the settings for individual articles from the WordPress editor.

What happens when I update an article?

BeyondWords can regenerate the audio using the updated article text. You can also keep the existing audio when an update doesn’t require a new version.

Can we use our own voices?

Yes. You can create Instant or Professional voice clones for journalists, authors, analysts, presenters, or other speakers. You must have the speaker’s permission.

You can also choose a premade voice or generate a voice from a prompt.

Can we monetize the audio?

Yes. Upload your own audio ads, connect an existing ad server, or use access tiers to create different listening experiences for visitors, registered readers, and subscribers.

Can we publish the audio as a podcast?

Yes. BeyondWords lets you create podcast feeds for services such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Does it work with Elementor and other page builders?

Yes. The plugin normally connects WordPress to BeyondWords through our REST API. For Elementor and other page-builder setups where that approach isn’t suitable, Magic Embed uses a script on your site to extract and sync the article content instead.

7.1.0

Release date: 4th September 2026

Enhancements

• #626 Import Tool: only offer to import to post types BeyondWords supports, and say why each skipped record was skipped.
• #623 Per-block language and voice in the block editor.

Fixes

• #627 Give audio creates a longer timeout, and recover the content ID when a create still times out after the API accepted it.
• #626 Debug Tool: fix the fatal error raised when activating the plugin.
  • Download the updated ZIP from this release — every earlier build fails on activation.
• #623 Fix “Generation disabled” being ignored on blocks nested inside a Group, Columns or other container.
  • Audio regenerated for an affected post no longer includes those blocks.
• #621 Fix the fatal error shown when the plugin is replaced with a different version from the Plugins screen.
  • Switching away from an existing 7.0.0 install still shows it once; the version being replaced has to be 7.1.0 or later for the fix to apply.

Deprecations

• #626 Removed the SpeechKit Export Tool, which only exported post meta the plugin stopped writing in v4.0.
  • Site Health and the editor’s Inspect panel report the same data for current installs.

Compatibility

• #626 Debug Tool: request logging is now switched off on WordPress VIP, where it could not append to its log file safely.
• #624 Tested up to WordPress 7.1.

Codebase Enhancements

• #626 Install and smoke-test the extension plugins in CI, and document them in doc/extension-plugins.md.
• #624 Turn off Cypress web security so the block editor specs run on WordPress 7.1.
• #629 Finalise the 7.1.0 release notes.
• #628 Dependency upgrades.
• #625 Mount the plugin at a fixed speechkit slug in the local wp-env environments.
• #622 Correct the 7.0.0 changelog entry for the “Add Player” block preview.

7.0.0

Release date: 12th August 2026

Enhancements

• #566 Poll the content status before embedding the player.
  • The block and classic editor previews now wait until content has finished processing — showing a loading spinner meanwhile — instead of embedding the player immediately and caching a 404 when the audio or video isn’t ready yet.
• #520 New settings page and project-wide rewrite.
  • Simplifies the plugin settings — removing many tabs, fields and options — so that audio/video generation and player display are managed from your BeyondWords project settings.
  • Standardises the codebase to WordPress VIP coding standards and migrates CI tooling from Yarn to npm.
• #527 BeyondWords editor redesign for the block and classic editors.
  • New Content (Source, Script template), Format (Output, Video template, Video size), Voice (Language, Model, Voice) and Player (Embed) settings, available in both editors.
  • The Player “Embed” setting replaces the “Display player” checkbox — choose “None” to hide the player on a post.
• #536 Wire up the Player “Embed” setting.
  • The Embed choice (audio/video × post/script) now controls the rendered player, rather than only showing or hiding it.
• #537 Opt-in “Customize” voice and language controls.
  • A per-post “Customize” toggle (off by default) reveals the Language and Voice pickers; the project’s default language is pre-selected when enabled.
  • The Voice and Language settings are consolidated into the plugin sidebar.
• #558 Reorder the voice picker to Language → Model → Voice.
  • “Model” is now a language-level filter that narrows the Voice list.
• #557 Preselect “Generate audio” by taxonomy term.
  • Reinstates preselecting audio generation for posts assigned specific terms, now across all hierarchical taxonomies and without marking posts as having unsaved changes.
• #555 Live player preview for the “Add Player” block. (Reverted in #568 before 7.0.0 shipped — the block shows a static placeholder in the editor; the player still renders on the front end.)
• #563 State-reflecting generation labels and “Legacy” model rename.
  • The “Generate audio” toggle now reads “Generation enabled” / “Generation disabled”; the “Standard” voice model bucket is relabelled “Legacy”.
• #532 Cache API reads and defer audio generation on WordPress VIP.
  • Editor dropdown data is cached in 15-minute transients; on VIP, audio create/update is deferred to WP-Cron so the save request returns immediately.
• #598 Send taxonomy terms as tags.
  • Breaking: the metadata param is no longer sent. Code hooking beyondwords_content_params to write $params['metadata'] must append to $params['tags'] instead, or it will raise a fatal error.
• #611 Tidy the classic editor metabox spacing and Content ID layout.

Fixes

• #618 Poll content status before embedding the block-editor Preview panel player, so a still-processing post (more likely with a customised voice/model) no longer shows a broken preview.
• #613 Fix author names with an ampersand showing as Smith & Sons in the BeyondWords dashboard.
• #612 Fix tags with an ampersand showing as r&d in the BeyondWords dashboard.
• #610 Stop the bulk “Generate audio” notice counting skipped posts as failures.
• #606 Fix posts published with no player when two saves race to create audio.
• #564 Sweep the paired _transient_timeout_beyondwords_* rows on uninstall, so no orphaned option rows are left behind.
• #540 Escape the player onload attribute to prevent stored XSS via the Content ID.
• #539 Add capability checks to the bulk-edit AJAX handler.
• #541 Prevent a player SDK error from clobbering saved content on Fetch.
• #554 Return JSON from the bulk-edit AJAX handler and catch delete errors.
• #553 Resolve the post ID in Content::get_content_without_excluded_blocks.
• #551 Track live meta for the Inspect panel Remove button.
• #550 Coerce non-string API error messages to avoid a fatal TypeError.
• #543 Guard a null languages API result in the classic editor voice select.
• #542 Surface a WP_Error from get_content() instead of a fatal TypeError.
• #588 Ship symfony/dom-crawler 5.4.52 to fix CVE-2026-45071 (XXE / local file disclosure).
  • The composer constraint now floors at the patched release, so a vulnerable version can no longer be bundled.

Deprecations

• Removed the beyondwords_player_style, beyondwords_player_content, beyondwords_title_voice_id, beyondwords_summary_voice_id and beyondwords_disabled post meta keys.
  • Existing values are preserved in the database and only removed on full uninstall; beyondwords_disabled is migrated to the new “Embed” setting on upgrade.
• The beyondwords-* <head> meta tags are now only emitted for the client-side (Magic Embed) integration.
• #601 Removed the “Script” option from the post Source setting, which now offers “Post” or “Post + script”.
  • Posts saved as “Script” are migrated to “Post + script” on upgrade, and keep embedding their script asset.

Compatibility

• Tested up to WordPress 7.0.
• #515 PHP 8.5 support.
  • Run unit and e2e tests against PHP 8.0 and PHP 8.5 in GitHub Actions.
  • Bumped phpVersion in wp-env to 8.5.

Codebase Enhancements

• #619 Run the Cypress suite with pretty permalinks, fixing the block editor Preview panel content-status poll spec.
• #591 Refresh the developer documentation in doc/ against the v7 codebase.
• #608 Fix the intermittent detached-DOM failures in the block editor Cypress specs.
• #607 Update two PHPUnit tests left stale by the Script-only Source removal.
• #602 Align the player-visibility docs and Cypress specs with the “Embed” setting.
• #600 Add must-follow documentation and changelog rules to AGENTS.md, with CLAUDE.md and Copilot pointer files.
• #533 Fix failing Cypress tests for v7.
• #538 Remove the unused updatePostMeta util from the Inspect panel.
• #562 Re-enable Plugin Check on plugin-check-action v1.1.7.
• #560 Cancel superseded CI runs via a concurrency group.
• #516 Remove environment from the GitHub workflows.
• #517, #535 Update GitHub Actions dependencies.
• #514, #529, #534, #616 Dependency upgrades.
• Various dependency updates to clear Dependabot security warnings.

See the previous changelogs here.