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Medium subscribers now get audio recordings of top stories

Medium subscribers now get audio recordings of top stories

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Medium audio section

Medium’s subscription service didn’t start off with all that many (any, really) features, but the company has just added a big one: audio recordings of some of the site’s top stories.

All of the audio stories will be “professionally recorded,” Medium says, and won’t be made using synthesized voices, like Siri. Every subscriber-exclusive story will get an audio version and “other top stories” picked by Medium editors will get recorded as well. At launch, there are a little over 50 articles with an audio option.

Medium might let writers upload their own recordings eventually

The recordings add a much more tangible benefit for Medium subscribers and could help the company tap into the audience that’s long relied on Audible for something to listen to in the car. On top of audio recordings, Medium has published several dozen subscriber-exclusive stories in the past two months. Subscribers are also able to save stories for offline reading in the Medium app.

Medium tells VentureBeat that it’s considering allowing “writers and publishers to upload their own narrations” and that it expects to “experiment with adding different types of audio content” in the coming months.