Publishers Taking Interest In Voice Content

Home voice assistants or smart speakers are still in their infancy as a consumer and revenue proposition, but publishers are stepping up their efforts to hire and create content for them anyway, seeing the rapid adoption rate of Amazon Echo, Google Home and their kin and the the fact that people are using them more over time, reports digiday.com.

Early on, getting content on voice assistants was mainly the job of the product people. Just like with TV and the internet before it, media companies just took their existing news and information and put it on voice assistants with minimal reformatting. But now that publishers are getting more interested in making sure they have a unique voice and proposition on the devices, they’re adding editorial-side resources, too.

NPR has six people who are dedicated to voice assistants and is in the process of creating an editorial position that will be dedicated to them. The New York Times is advertising for a voice editor to help define the Times on voice-enabled devices. The person will be part of special projects and work on prototypes and the publication of its first set of voice experiences on these platforms, according to a job posting. The Washington Post has a six-person audio team in the newsroom, which it split off from audience development early this year, to focus on home assistants along with podcasts and other kinds of audio storytelling.

Bloomberg Media has two to three people who work getting content like its Market Minute on the Apple HomePod, Echo and Home — a “substantial” number, said Julia Beizer, chief product officer there.

Publishers have already used automation to convert their text content for the devices or just taken their existing audio like podcasts and redistributed them there. Now, along with dedicating people to the devices, publishers also are starting to create device-specific content, which is often shorter than regular podcasts and with a daily frequency. The Washington Post has its “Daily 202” and “Retropod” that are short and created with smart speakers in mind; in the same way, NPR created a short, daily spinoff of its Planet Money podcast called “The Indicator.”

It’s not to say that lots of questions don’t remain for these publishers, especially since they’ve been burned before when they’ve put resources into feeding content to platforms, only to be disappointed when audience and revenue didn’t materialize.