I have to admit that I’ genuinely saddened by the fact that there will be no more Amazon Polly WordPress plugin.
For the last few years over at Clever Marketing, the digital agency in Camberley, Surrey, I’ve written some 150+ digital marketing blogs. Whilst the blog posts, on topics from content to SEO, were highly effective one of the criticisms I received was that “there’s too much text”.
Thin Content
Now that’s a concern that I do hear every once in a while. However, if I have to explain a complex digital marketing subject, or conduct a deep-dive into an SEO problem that requires a solution, then I need to be as verbose as is necessary to get the salient points across. Sometimes you just can’t do that in a few hundred words.
Another issue is that if you make written content too short, then you run the risk of publishing “thin content”. This is the concept of writing copy that is insufficient to ensure a user’s needs are met.
I made a personal professional policy on this back in 2007 when a news agency provided my employer with XML content and I quickly realised that for it to be more useful to the website’s users, the content needed to be more comprehensive. So I set about expanded the “thin content” I was provided with and soon started to rank higher and receive more traffic than the other websites that published the exact same thin content. I also avoided the duplicate content trap too, so that was a win-win-win.
Helping Readers with “Too Much Text”
When someone says there’s too much text, you may disagree. Your personal preference might be for the long form content. However, if the point has been raised and on more than one occasion, then it’s wise to consider the feedback.
Whilst I’m a strong proponent of long-form articles, I do sometimes tire of reading epic swathes of text. Every so often I also want to skip to the end, read the conclusion, or wish I’d only read the TL;DR at the start of the article and no more.
So how do we deal with the issue that some readers may have an appetite for shorter texts?
Well, one thing that became apparent was that someone who said that the blog post text was too much, was an avid subscriber to podcasts. They’d referenced a number of recent episodes in digital marketing, and I realised that, whilst I didn’t do video, I could try audio…
Enter Amazon Polly
Looking for text-to-speech solution, I searched the WordPress plugin directory for an answer. And fortuitously I discovered the Amazon Polly plugin for WordPress.
Originally launched back in 2018, Polly is an Amazon Web Service (AWS) that takes the text of your webpage text and converts it into an audio file. The WordPress plugin helps to extract the text from a blog post and convert it to speech. Additionally it inserts a player into the blog post page so that you can conveniently press the play button and listen to the blog post, no matter how wordy it is.
The issue of “too much text” suddenly became a moot point as the person who had originally “switched off” when there was too much copy suddenly started to enjoy the new additional format.
What a result.
It also helped with ranking, engagement, and became a virtuous cycle, as the audience realised they had an additional, alternative method in which to consume their digital marketing blog content. Yet another win-win-win.
Blog Writing Writing for Amazon Poly
Another great benefit of writing digital marketing blogs, then having them converted text-to-speech, was that I suddenly heard issues with my copy.
Sometimes my personal style sounded a little quirky and so I decided to tweak my writing to sound more flowing.
Any typos or grammatical errors became apparent too. Sometimes my Amazon Polly reader’s voice, Anna, with a soft English accent, sounded breathless. So I learned to break up my sentences and paragraphs with tactical punctuation.
Lists were a revelation as well. If I didn’t place a stop at the end of each list item, Anna would barrel through the unordered lists without pause, converging one line immediately into the next, making it into a bit of a word salad. The pause was something that I’d clicked a tick box in my AWS account to have, it sounded more natural. You could almost audibly hear the synthesised voice draw in breath. It was an excellent user experience, highly realistic, and very convincing.
The Amazon Polly WordPress plugin experiment was a great success. We enjoyed a period of improved optimisation for both written, SEO, and audible output. The skills were being honed.
But Then… No More Amazon Polly WordPress Plugin
The WordPress plugin suddenly stopped working. The audio player inserts at the beginning of each of my digital marketing blog posts suddenly disappeared.
The advantage I’d engineered into each blog piece was no longer there.
Looking at the documentation, I saw these words in the document history for Amazon Polly:
- Change: WordPress update.
- Description: The Amazon Polly WordPress plugin will no longer be supported.
- Date: April 6, 2023.
I was gutted. After that serendipitous find, my mojo was being taken away. I hadn’t even had time to explore the Pollycast feature and RSS2.0 compliant feeds for a podcast idea… oh well..
Now, as a busy digital marketing and SEO manager, I didn’t have time to find a solution to replace the plugin. So, crowdsourcing this, does anyone know how to get Amazon Polly to convert text-to-speech without the now deprecated WordPress plugin? Is there an alternative that can be used in its place?
Answers on a postcard to…
Alternatives to Amazon Polly?
If anyone can suggest a substitute method of delivering audio from blog posts, that would be most appreciated. I’m sure, if I can find the time, that I could hard-code Amazon Polly into my WordPress posts.
If you have any ideas, please comment below or send me your ideas in the contact form. Alternatively I will try and find time to resolve this issue and find a surrogate service, maybe ChatGPT will help me discover or even build a new solution?