Segmented Voiceover?

  • I am hoping someone might have some ideas about the best way to implement this. I have been developing for and using WordPress for more than a decade but this is the first time I have a project with this particular requirement. I’ve searched forums and tried plugins and have found nothing even similar so I am reaching out now to see if I can avoid producing a completely from-scratch custom solution, which I would love to avoid doing.

    There is a site with a significant amount of content (>1m words in text) and much of this is educational. To make it more accessible, the creators are looking to have two types of voiceover content. For many of the articles, they want to have someone read the content and have that able to be played by clicking a button at the top of the page. How to organize and store and link this audio content and make it easy for them to record and upload the voiceovers for each page is the first part of my question. I know I can manually add a sound recording to a page but this is many thousands of pages and it will need to be done by people with no development experience. These will be teachers and they will be recording the audio then needing to sign in and upload it, usually to attach to articles they’ve written. Avoiding manual uploads would be preferred. I don’t care where these files are stored and I think they would be open to a third-party solution as long as it was scalable.

    The second part is even more complex. For much of the content, simply reading the page isn’t useful. Non-articles are split into many sections, a lot of it only a few lines long. The hope is to be able to attach a voice recording to each section, not just each page, with the same ability for the author of the section to upload a recording of that section and people be able to click a button next to the section to hear them read it.

    I can see many text-to-speech solutions but this is about having an actual person create a recording then attach it to a specific page or section of text and that’s something I can’t seem to find anywhere.

    Please help.

    • This topic was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by Jan Dembowski.
Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • Very nice idea. You’ve clearly already put a lot of thought into it.

    However, if the teachers record an audio file, it must also be uploaded to the project so that it is available on the website. Uploading has to happen in any case and is very easy to do in WordPress. I think anyone who records an audio file in this quality will also be able to handle the upload dialogue in a website.

    My recommendation for the implementation would actually be the manual way when it comes to uploading individual files. In the Gutenberg editor it is very easy to select the audio block, upload the file in it and place the block in the page. In Elementor and other PageBuilders, this certainly works easily as well.

    Any other solution again depends heavily on your project and would require custom development. I suppose you want to output the audio file at a certain place when the pages are called up? Then you would have to add this output to the template. Then, of course, you have to deposit the file on the page so that it can also be output. To do this, you could develop a plugin that adds this property to the page or post. The teacher would then have a field for uploading the audio file in the Gutenberg editor in the page administration, for example. As soon as he or she has done this, the audio file is output on the page at the place you have defined for playback.

    As an admin, you could then also automatically fill this property on the page/post with a sample file, e.g. by using WP_CLI on the console.

    I don’t see this individual solution as being that complicated. I’m also a bit surprised why no one has written a plugin for this yet (or I can’t find it), especially since the topic of accessibility is very important.

    The only sticking point is the recording of the audio files. WordPress cannot do this as software and must be recorded on the computers of those who speak the texts. There is a lot of software that can do just that.

    Thread Starter avi sato

    (@avisato)

    thank you for your thoughts there. no, uploading it is no problem and i have actually written a simplified uploader for the project for video. the problem isn’t getting the file into wordpress. it’s attaching the audio recordings to specific segments of text. a single page might have a hundred or more lines of text, each with an individual recording. the organization so there can be a little “play” button by each paragraph is what i’m struggling with.

    Which PageBuilder do you use to manage the pages? Gutenberg, Elementor, Divi .. whatever? Depending on this, you would have to write a plugin that makes an addition to the existing blocks/elements in this PageBuilder so that one audio file can be stored per block.

    Thread Starter avi sato

    (@avisato)

    gutenberg. i was hoping there might be an already-existing solution. sadly, it does appear i will have to build something.

    I don’t know how far you are with your implementation. Last week I wrote a small plugin that fulfils your wish. It is now published here:
    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/audio-on-every-block/

    The plugin adds the possibility to add an audio file to each text block. This is then output as audio playback in the frontend. You can overwrite the output via template but also define in the plugin settings whether it should come before or after the text (so you could also define the exact position via CSS).

    Thread Starter avi sato

    (@avisato)

    wow. that’s fantastic. i haven’t even begun on the project yet and it’s probably at least six or eight months away from being approved by the client so i have lots of time. i’m going to play with it on my own personal site, though, so i’ll let you know how it goes.

    Thread Starter avi sato

    (@avisato)

    looks good to me. i was wondering if there was a way to include an option for a link to a file rather than using something in the media library.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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