Hello, and welcome to the PolyInContent Digest Review of - BeyondWords
This is a tool for taking your written posts/content, and turning it into an audio using advanced text to speech.
They even organize it all in a unique "Audio CMS" of their own design.
One thing to keep in mind for this series is that it is for giving and overview and opinion on various content repurposing tools out there.
The structure is the overview, pricing, pros, cons, and then any particular experience I may have with the tool good or bad. Finally, at the end I’ll wrap up any extra thoughts.
Overview
This tool has been with me for a long time on my content journey, and I wanted to do an "Over-Review" on it today.
You take your written content and turn it into audio content, using over 100+ voices.
You start off on the Projects Dashboard
Sites = Projects.
Then the Content Dashboard:
A VERY in depth analytics page:
Let's say for whatever reason you need to edit the audio's text:
I will have to say out of all my years, and 420+ pieces of content, that I've never had to do this.
Here is what I made the audio player look like on THIS site:
This just adds another layer to each blog post, which helps people of all backgrounds. You never know when someone who you'll really want to see your post, but they don't have time to literally read it. They do however have the time to listen as they go.
Pricing
I'll be honest with you, that price is pretty steep. At least it goes down to $89 if you do the yearly, but I understand not everyone can afford that.
If you have a big time blog, and you're making an income from multiple sources. I think that would allow you to manage that cost.
Weighted Pros/Cons
Pros
- Powerful Audio CMS
- Great and helpful team
- Quality voices (plus choices)
- Various outputs for the audio files, including a podcast option.
- Ad placements
Cons
- Cost is high
- Voice Cloning not available yet
While not a con, I have a feeling that they are missing some sort of output, perhaps to a tool like Lumen5 or FlexClip, or something that can create videos. Imagine what you could do if you were able to use BW to take a blog post and make it into a video.
My Experience
Note: That this may be what I had happened, but your mileage may vary.
Let me first start by saying that they have been with me longer than any other tool I can think of at this point. It all started when I was on Wordpress, and I wanted to see what plugins were available.
At the time there was 11,000 plugins in the directory on Wordpress.org, and I went through every single one (at least every single interesting one, some were obviously junk).
What I found one day was Speechkit, a plugin that turned your articles into listenable audio files, which is great for people on the go or hearing impaired.
This was well before any competitor like play.ht came around, and it sounded pretty good in my opinion. The voices were still text to speech sounding, but at least they had flow to the words.
Eventually I'd meet up with the team online, and they were just as excited as I was about the tool. Obviously since they made it, but over the years slowly kept in touch. They offered me a beta feature, but I totally failed at completing the tasks needed to do it. Sigh.
They eventually renamed to Beyondwords, which makes sense honestly, and the tool has continuously evolved.
I talk about my experience using BW on Wordpress vs Ghost in the video review above!
The team has always been a joy to talk to, and the tool itself adds a great part to each post.
Wrap Up
In the end this tool is a bit different than the rest I have Over-Reviewed in the past few weeks. However it is one of my favorites, and I've used them for a long time.
I figured that it would be wise to highlight this tool during the review sprint, so that all of you could be aware of it! Check it out!!
"Engage audiences with accurate text-to-speech conversion and natural-sounding synthetic voices."
Use one of the most powerful text to speech tools to add new depth your already awesome content!!
