Should newsrooms build or buy an AI audio stack?

As newsrooms expand into AI audio, many face the same strategic choice: Build your own workflow using a general-purpose TTS API, or let BeyondWords handle everything for you.

In other words, should you build or buy your audio stack?

In this post, we’ll compare these two AI audio approaches. So you can choose the one that makes sense for your newsroom.

General-purpose TTS APIs vs BeyondWords at a glance

Using a general-purpose TTS API means engineering your own stack and workflow. A service like Polly, Azure, Google, ElevenLabs, Hume, or Cartesia handles audio generation, and you build the surrounding infrastructure. This gives you full control over your stack, but it takes a lot of work.

On the other hand, BeyondWords provides everything you need out of the box—content generation, distribution, analytics, monetization—giving you a complete workflow with far less engineering effort. The company also provides ongoing support and product development.

Here’s a quick general-purpose TTS API vs. BeyondWords comparison table:

Keep reading or listening to learn more about these differences.

Content extraction

General-purpose TTS APIs

General-purpose TTS APIs don’t extract or clean your content—your team has to build a system that identifies which parts of each article should be narrated and which should be excluded.

Without proper extraction, elements such as navigation labels, captions, inline components, related links, or HTML fragments may end up in the audio. Most newsrooms solve this by building custom logic to parse article templates, strip out unwanted elements, and deliver only clean editorial content to the API.

This approach works, but it requires maintenance whenever templates or CMS structures change.

BeyondWords

BeyondWords offers Magic Embed, Ghost, and WordPress integrations, which automatically extract clean editorial content for narration. This ensures a great listening experience and keeps audio consistent through CMS changes, removing the ongoing maintenance your team would otherwise have to manage.

If you use our API or RSS Feed Importer, you will need to set up and maintain extraction logic. But our support team will be on hand to help you with any issues.

Voice selection

General-purpose TTS APIs

General-purpose TTS APIs like Polly, Azure, Google, ElevenLabs, Hume, and Cartesia offer wide selections of high-quality voices, but these voices are built for various use cases (such as video game characters). So, you may need to sift through dozens to find one suitable for news narration.

Some providers, including ElevenLabs and Azure, also offer voice cloning. The quality, training requirements, and licensing vary by model, so your results depend heavily on which provider you choose.

Once you pick a provider, you’re largely locked into its capabilities. If another vendor releases better voices or more advanced cloning, moving over isn’t trivial—it typically means updating your integration, rebuilding parts of your workflow, and adapting to a new set of tools.

BeyondWords

BeyondWords is built to keep pace with rapid advances in voice technology. We integrate high-performing voices and cloning models from providers like Azure and ElevenLabs, expanding our support for new models as they reach the quality bar our publishers expect.

This gives you long-term flexibility: your audio quality improves as the market evolves, without requiring you to rework your workflow or switch vendors.

We also curate the voices available in the platform to ensure they meet newsroom standards, and we can help you select the right voice for any publication. That expertise leads to stronger sonic branding and saves your newsroom from evaluating an ever-growing list of models.

Pronunciation accuracy

General-purpose TTS APIs

Most general-purpose TTS APIs perform basic text normalization before generating audio, automatically converting non-standard text like numbers, dates, and abbreviations into their expected spoken forms.

However, these systems aren’t context-aware, so they can misinterpret ambiguous elements—for example, reading “$” as “dollars” when the article means “pesos”.

These APIs generally let you correct mispronunciations by adding custom pronunciation rules through SSML or a lexicon, but these fixes must be created and maintained manually.

BeyondWords

BeyondWords includes an AI preprocessing layer that converts your text into its most accurate spoken form before it reaches the voice model. And it analyzes context to identify the correct meaning of ambiguous elements—for example, deciding whether “$” should be spoken as “dollars” or “pesos”, or whether “5m” should be spoken as “five miles”, “five million” or “five meters”.

This adds a layer of quality assurance and cuts down the manual effort required to fix mispronunciations.

For domain-specific terminology, you can define custom pronunciation rules once and apply them everywhere. BeyondWords stores and manages these rules across projects and publications, removing the engineering and maintenance burden of building your own system.

Integration 

General-purpose TTS APIs

Integrating a general-purpose TTS API means building your own audio workflow around it. The API will generate the audio, but your team is responsible for everything else—authentication, storage, webhooks, and delivering files to your website or app. This allows for flexibility but can take a lot of work.

If your newsroom publishes across multiple platforms, you’ll need to build separate integrations or automate distribution yourself. And because each provider offers different endpoints, formats, and constraints, switching models or adding new ones typically requires engineering changes and testing across your entire stack.

BeyondWords

BeyondWords offers multiple integrations built for newsroom publishing. 

The Magic Embed, WordPress plugin, and Ghost plugin provide handling for audio creation, updates, and distribution automatically. This eliminates the need for custom infrastructure and makes it easy to maintain AI audio as your technology stack changes.

For teams that want more flexibility and control, BeyondWords also provides the API and RSS Feed Importer. These options let you build a fully customized workflow, with your own logic for handling updates and managing the player on the front end.

Editorial workflow

General-purpose TTS APIs

With general-purpose TTS APIs, you need to build your own editorial logic. The API will generate audio when you call it, but it won’t determine which stories should be narrated, how updates are handled, or how different desks should control audio across the site.

If you want audio to appear only in certain sections, formats, or post types, those rules have to be implemented in your CMS or publishing pipeline. Any changes editors want to make—like turning audio on or off for a category—usually require engineering support.

BeyondWords

BeyondWords fits into your editorial workflow by automatically converting articles into audio and video, distributing them across your chosen channels, and keeping them updated as your content changes.

In WordPress and Ghost, you can choose which content types should generate audio and exclude pages when needed. With Magic Embed, audio appears only on pages where the script is added. For RSS and API integrations, audio is created only for the items you send.

You can also create separate projects for different content categories or publications. Each project has its own voices and settings, so teams can maintain editorial control without affecting the rest of the organization.

Distribution 

General-purpose TTS APIs

General-purpose TTS APIs generate audio files, but they don’t provide a built-in way to distribute that audio across your websites, apps, or other listening channels. Once the file is created, your team needs to decide where it’s stored, how it’s delivered, and how it stays in sync with article updates.

To embed audio on your site, you’ll need to build or integrate your own player. 

If you want a podcast feed or playlist experience, you’ll need to generate RSS feeds, host the audio, and manage updates manually. 

Expanding into new channels—like mobile apps or third-party platforms—requires additional development work and infrastructure.

BeyondWords

With BeyondWords, you can embed audio into your website or app using the customizable BeyondWords Player, which lets listeners jump to any paragraph, follow highlighted text as it’s read, and continue listening as they browse. 

If you prefer a bespoke experience, you can use our JavaScript, iOS, and Android player SDKs to build your own interface while still relying on BeyondWords for playback functionality and analytics.

BeyondWords also offers podcast-ready RSS feeds, letting you publish narrated articles directly to podcast apps without extra tooling. 

For curated listening experiences, you can create embeddable playlists that showcase your chosen selection of audios. Or let readers create their own audio queues.

Monetization 

General-purpose TTS APIs

General-purpose TTS APIs don’t include built-in monetization features, so you’ll need to build your own system for audio ads, sponsorships, or ad-network integrations. This typically means creating or integrating an ad-insertion system, managing ad inventory, stitching ads into files or streams, and ensuring ads stay in sync when articles are updated.

Supporting dynamic ads or VAST tags adds even more complexity, often requiring extra infrastructure and third-party tools.

BeyondWords

BeyondWords makes it easy to monetize your narrated content. You can upload your own audio ads or connect programmatic campaigns using VAST tags, with flexible pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll placement options. Companion links and images are supported, and all playback and engagement data is captured automatically through BeyondWords Analytics.

The BeyondWords Player also works with paywalls, so you can make audio part of your subscription experience. This can be a great way to boost conversions and increase subscriber loyalty.

Analytics 

General-purpose TTS APIs

General-purpose TTS APIs don’t provide analytics on how audio performs once published. If you want to understand listening behavior—such as play rates, engagement time, drop-off points, or unique listeners—you’ll need to build your own tracking layer.

This typically involves setting up hosting and delivery infrastructure, instrumenting your custom player, sending events to an analytics platform, and stitching those metrics back into your editorial or product dashboards. 

BeyondWords

BeyondWords includes native analytics designed specifically for newsrooms, covering metrics like plays, unique listeners, engagement rate, playback duration, and device usage.

You can also send BeyondWords Player events directly to Google Analytics, or use our analytics API to send data to your chosen analytics platform.

These insights allow your teams to understand what audiences are listening to, when they stop, and which formats or topics perform best. Analytics are collected wherever you use the BeyondWords Player—no custom tracking required.

Video generation

General-purpose TTS APIs

Most general-purpose TTS APIs focus solely on audio generation and don’t offer built-in support for creating video versions of your articles. If you want to produce AI-powered news videos, you’ll need to build this yourself or integrate multiple third-party tools.

This usually requires:

• stitching together audio, images, and captions;
• rendering and hosting video files;
• managing updates when articles change; and
• maintaining separate workflows for audio and video.

If your newsroom wants both audio and video output at scale, this typically doubles the amount of engineering work and infrastructure required.

BeyondWords

BeyondWords allows you to generate video versions of your articles using the same workflow you use for audio—no new tools, no separate pipelines, and no extra engineering overhead.

These videos combine high-quality AI narration, relevant visuals, and on-screen captions to maximize reader engagement while minimizing costs. And they can be monetized through VAST integration.

Costs and scalability

General-purpose TTS APIs

General-purpose TTS APIs typically charge based on characters, seconds, or tokens, depending on the provider and model. This can make costs unpredictable at scale, especially if your newsroom publishes frequently, updates stories throughout the day, or generates multiple versions of an article.

You also need to factor in the cost of the additional infrastructure you build around the model API. As your output grows, these supporting systems need ongoing maintenance, and scaling them across multiple publications or regions can increase both operational complexity and engineering cost.

BeyondWords

With BeyondWords, you pay a monthly platform fee that covers all the infrastructure you require, plus a usage-based fee for each audio or video generated. 

When you update an article, BeyondWords updates your audio and video automatically—at no extra charge. This is a major advantage for fast-paced newsrooms with evolving stories.

This model keeps costs predictable and removes the need to budget for separate systems or infrastructure. And as usage grows, the platform scales automatically, making it easy to expand AI audio across multiple brands, verticals, or regions.

Access controls

General-purpose TTS APIs

Most general-purpose TTS APIs leave governance and safeguards up to you. This means you’re responsible for ensuring clones are created with proper consent, managing who can access which voices, preventing misuse, and keeping track of where cloned voices are being used. 

This can be challenging across large editorial organizations, especially when managing multiple brands, freelancers, or journalist voice rights. Without a governance layer, there’s a higher operational burden on product and compliance teams.

BeyondWords

BeyondWords provides a structured governance layer designed for publishers. Access to custom voices can be managed by project, publication, or user role, ensuring only authorized teams can create or use specific voices. Clones remain centrally controlled, with clear visibility into how and where they’re used.

Consent, approvals, and voice permissions can be managed directly in the platform, reducing legal and compliance overhead. If voice access needs to be restricted, reassigned, or disabled, teams can do so without rebuilding workflows or redeploying code. 

This helps publishers use advanced voice technologies responsibly while maintaining clear oversight across the organization.

How to choose the right approach for your newsroom

When a general-purpose TTS API may be the right fit

A standalone TTS API can work well if your organization:

• has strong in-house engineering resources;
• wants to manage extraction, preprocessing, distribution, analytics, and monetization;
• is comfortable building and maintaining custom workflows;
• has a highly specialized use case; and/or
• prefers to integrate audio generation into an existing internal system.

In these cases, general-purpose TTS APIs can deliver deep flexibility and integration potential, but they require significant ongoing investment in engineering and maintenance.

When BeyondWords is the better fit

BeyondWords is designed for newsrooms that want a faster, more reliable way to scale AI audio without taking on significant engineering overhead. It’s the stronger choice if your organization:

• wants high-quality audio and video with minimal setup;
• needs accurate extraction, context-aware preprocessing, and consistent pronunciation;
• prefers built-in tools for distribution, analytics, and monetization;
• wants to keep your stack updated with the latest voice models;
• needs editorial control and governance across multiple brands or teams; and/or
• wants to roll out audio across newsrooms quickly and sustainably.

BeyondWords handles the workflow around the voice models so publishers can focus on storytelling—not infrastructure.

Want to see how BeyondWords fits into your newsroom’s workflow? Book a demo to explore the platform and speak with our team.