How Narration Works
Every story on My Local Press can be listened to, not just read. Here's how that works, and how you can have your stories read in your own voice.
Stories are narrated automatically
When you publish a story, we narrate it for you in one of our clear, natural standard voices — automatically, at no cost. Readers can listen instead of read, on the feed or in the car. You don't have to turn anything on.
Automatic narration happens whenever your story's language is one we support. If we can't narrate a particular language yet — or a story is unusually long — it still publishes normally; it just won't have audio. The create form tells you if a story is too long to auto-narrate.
Your own voice (optional)
Prefer your stories read in your voice? Record a short sample once, and we'll use it to narrate your future stories in a voice that sounds like you. It's an optional upgrade to the standard narration above — not the only way to get audio.
Once your voice is set up, each story gives you a simple choice before you publish: My voice reads it in your voice, Default voice uses one of our standard voices. You can decide per story.
When it says a word wrong
Synthetic voices get local names wrong — a village, a family surname, a street everyone here says one particular way. You can teach it. On one of your own stories, Fix a pronunciation sits next to the listen controls: pick the word, and we suggest two or three plain spellings of how it sounds, like "teh-SOO-keh". Play each one, or write your own, and save.
The fix applies to every story with that word in it, not just the one you were listening to — we re-record the published ones, which takes a few minutes. If the story belongs to a publication, the correction covers the whole publication by default, so everyone writing for it gets the same reading; you can keep it to your own stories instead. Your story's text never changes: readers still see it spelled the way you wrote it.
Listening to a story
Wherever a story can be heard, you'll see a headphones Listen control — on its feed card and at the top of the story.
- Ready to play — if the audio already exists, it starts right away.
- Made on demand — if it hasn't been created yet, one tap makes it (this takes a moment), then it plays.
- Follows you — playback continues as you keep browsing, with a player you can pause anytime.
If you set up your own voice, you stay in control of it. You can review or delete your voice anytime, and when you delete it, we delete the data behind it. Read about voice & privacy .
Questions? Reach us through our feedback form.
We ship updates all the time, so a page here and there can fall behind. See something off? Have a question? Let us know and we'll address it.