How El Líbero takes its morning briefing beyond the inbox

Every weekday morning, El Líbero gives its audience a head start on the news.

Selección Nacional, the publication’s most-read newsletter, and Lo Mejor de la Prensa, its audio edition, update audiences on the latest news from across Chile.

Until recently, this meant an early start for podcast host Magdalena Olea Urrejola.

Now, Magdalena sleeps while her voice goes to work.

Making daily production more predictable

El Líbero worked with BeyondWords to create a professional clone of Magdalena’s voice. The team can submit scripts through our API and receive the finished audio in seconds.

That gives Lo Mejor de la Prensa the familiar voice listeners already know, with a faster and more predictable production process.

Here's a short demo of Magdalena's voice clone:

“It’s important to understand that recording audio early in the morning is no ordinary task,” says Felipe Morales, CTO at El Líbero.

“Most people do not wake up with their voice in perfect condition for recording: you need to prepare your throat and diction, avoid nasal congestion, and meet a long list of other conditions. And that is without even mentioning staying up late the night before.

“You can forget about all of these issues when it is no longer the journalist who is recording, but simply her voice.”

Protecting trust through transparency

El Líbero is transparent about the use of AI narration in Lo Mejor de la Prensa. Every episode concludes with a spoken disclosure, and a written notice appears in the show’s Spotify description.

Because Magdalena’s cloned voice sounds so close to her own, listeners could easily assume she had recorded the episode herself. The disclosures remove that ambiguity, helping the publisher maintain trust with its audience and meet modern ethical standards.

They also reassure listeners that AI usage is limited to narration. The reporting, editorial decisions, and script remain the work of El Líbero’s human team.

Building a script for listeners

Each morning, reporters working several hours ahead of Chile review the latest stories from the national press, allowing them to prepare the morning briefing before most of its audience wakes up. Alongside Selección Nacional, they write a dedicated script for Lo Mejor de la Prensa.

The two cover the same news, but are written for different formats. 

For the podcast, the team leaves out elements designed for reading and browsing, then reshapes the remaining stories into a continuous narrative. The opening is shortened, spoken transitions connect each topic, and the segments are arranged to create a clear progression through the day’s news.

The audio edition lets people catch up while commuting, getting ready for work, or doing anything else that makes reading less convenient.

“You can be just as well informed whether you read the newsletter or listen to the podcast,” says Felipe.

Meeting audiences everywhere

A pre-recorded intro and outro are automatically stitched together with the narration in BeyondWords, so the El Líbero team receives a complete and polished audio file ready to distribute.

Here's an example of a finished podcast:

From there, Lo Mejor de la Prensa reaches audiences across multiple channels.

Every episode is published for free on Spotify, giving users an easy way to make the briefing part of their existing listening routine.

El Líbero also embeds each podcast episode on its website homepage. 

“This helps introduce the podcast to new listeners who may not know about it and who may never have considered that, in just five minutes, they can become fully informed about the most relevant news of the day,” Felipe explains.

Paying users can also receive the podcast through WhatsApp, the most used messaging app in Chile. Subscribers were already listening to another El Líbero podcast this way, giving the team confidence that the channel could work for Lo Mejor de la Prensa, too. 

Delivering the briefing through WhatsApp also puts it somewhere subscribers are likely to look early in the day. Rather than having to seek out the latest edition, they find it alongside the messages they are already checking each morning.

Some mornings are made for listening

El Líbero first adopted BeyondWords to narrate articles on its website, giving readers another way to consume the news. The publisher now serves its morning audience with that same flexibility, and sees potential in expanding across more of its output.

“Using BeyondWords in this process has not only helped us overcome the natural human challenges involved in producing a handcrafted product very early in the morning, but has also helped us speed up the entire workflow,” says Felipe. “We’re now looking to bring more of our newsletters to audio.”

If you have newsletters or articles worth listening to, book a demo with our team. We’ll show you how easy it can be to roll out audio that complements your editorial strategy and stays true to your brand.

The audio version of this article uses Caroline Piercy’s voice clone for narration and a premade AI voice for Felipe Morales’s quotes.