As Austin grows, and news moves faster than ever before, the Austin American-Statesman is offering a new way to engage with its award-winning journalism: audio storytelling.
Most articles on Statesman.com are now available as audio stories, read by Zane, a humanlike automated voice created by Everlit. This advanced text-to-speech technology allows you to engage with the news during your daily commute or while multitasking, and caters to the growing number of people who prefer listening to the news instead of reading it. It also improves accessibility to our journalism for visually impaired readers.
You can find the audio version of each story just below an article’s headline and lead image, on our website or in our app. Click the play button in the box to hear the narration.
If you’d like to catch up on multiple stories at once, a playlist on our home page plays the latest Statesman stories one after another. You can find that by visiting Statesman.com and scrolling down to our News section, where you’ll see it on the right side of your screen titled “🎧 Today’s Top Stories.” This playlist is not currently available in our app.
The audio for each story includes a disclaimer to make listeners aware that a voice generated by artificial intelligence is reading the story – not an actual person or staff member.
Although Everlit’s AI-powered text-to-speech technology is among the most sophisticated in the business for its ability to closely mimic human speech, some pronunciation errors are to be expected. Statesman staff will continually correct mispronounced words via Everlit’s pronunciation library.