Hear it in ten seconds: a real article with the Hearald player — press play. That MP3 was made by this plugin and lives in that site’s Media Library.
Hearald Publisher gives every article on your site a “Listen” button. When you publish, the plugin sends the article’s text to the Hearald audio service, which narrates it with a natural neural voice (Kokoro-82M) and returns an MP3. The MP3 is saved into your own Media Library, and a clean, lightweight player appears above (or below) your article — readers press play, and your writing meets them while they commute, cook, or walk.
Your audio is yours. Every narration is a normal MP3 in your Media Library. It is served by your site, it keeps playing if you change plans or stop using Hearald, and uninstalling the plugin leaves it where it is.
What it does
- Generates an audio edition automatically on publish (optional), or per-article from the editor
- Detects real edits by content: a meaningless save changes nothing; a material edit marks the audio “needs updating” (or regenerates automatically, your choice)
- Seven curated voices (US and UK, male and female) with a per-article override
- A Hearald dashboard: which articles have audio, their status, length and voice — plus plays, completions and minutes listened when you enable analytics
- An Audio column and status filter on the Posts screen
- A dependency-free player: seek, keyboard controls, playback speed, graceful when audio is unavailable
- Player styling: your own accent colour, light/dark/follow-the-reader, and your theme’s font if you prefer it
[hearald_player]shortcode for manual placement- Hidden messages: set words large with
[hearald_mark], hide a phrase in their first letters, and let readers claim a code with[hearald_hidden_message]
Plans
- Free — 5 articles a month. No card: get a free license key in under a minute.
- Publisher — $19/month for 50 articles a month.
- Publisher Pro — $50/month for 500 articles a month.
Plans count audio generations per license key per calendar month: publishing a new article, or regenerating one whose words or voice changed, uses one. Regenerating audio that already matches the article costs nothing. See https://forgehouse.app/hearald/publisher/
What it costs your readers: nothing. The player is static assets served by your site and one MP3 file. No reader accounts, no tracking scripts, no cookies.
Listen analytics are opt-in and aggregate-only. When enabled, your site counts plays, completions and seconds listened per article — three numbers. No IPs, no user agents, no identifiers, no per-reader anything, ever.
External service disclosure
This plugin relies on the Hearald audio service to synthesize speech. It does not work without an account and connection to a service endpoint.
What is sent, and when: When you (or your auto-generate setting) request audio for a post, the plugin transmits to the Hearald service (https://audio.forgehouse.app, unless you set another endpoint under Advanced): the post’s published text content (title, headings, paragraphs, lists, quotes), the post ID, the chosen voice, a salted non-reversible hash identifying your site, and your license key. Testing the connection sends only your license key. Nothing is transmitted until you enter a license key and request generation. Draft, pending and private posts are never sent — generation is refused for anything unpublished. The plugin then downloads the finished MP3 from the service into your Media Library.
What is not sent: reader data of any kind, user accounts, emails, comments, credentials, or content of posts you did not generate audio for.
What the service stores: the job record (site hash, post ID, post title, voice, content hash, status), kept for 30 days, and the generated MP3 only until your site has copied it — it is deleted as soon as your site collects it, and after 7 days at most. The article text is held only while it waits in the queue and is being narrated, and is discarded when generation finishes. Your license key is stored only as a one-way hash, alongside your plan and monthly article count. Uninstalling the plugin removes all plugin settings and post data from WordPress; the MP3s in your Media Library stay unless you delete them.
License checks (Gumroad): Plans are sold through Gumroad. To confirm which plan a license key belongs to, the Hearald service sends the key and the Hearald product ID to Gumroad’s license verification API. No article content or site data is sent to Gumroad. Gumroad terms: https://gumroad.com/terms — privacy: https://gumroad.com/privacy
Service provider: Hearald — https://forgehouse.app/hearald/ — terms and privacy: https://forgehouse.app/hearald/privacy/
The optional “Powered by Hearald” credit on the player is off by default and only appears if you enable it.
Screenshots
The player above a real article on blog.forgehouse.app — one MP3 served by the site itself, no third-party scripts. The oversized words are a hidden message.
The Hearald dashboard: every article's audio status, voice and length, plus plays, completions and time listened when analytics are on.
Settings: paste your license key, pick a voice, choose where the player goes, and decide whether new posts narrate automatically.
The same article on a phone.
The Hearald Audio box in the editor: generate, regenerate or remove audio per article, with a per-article voice override.