How we generate an audio version of our newsletter in under five minutes

I love consuming podcasts, but I've never had any interest in creating one. From attending journalism school to working in content marketing, writing has always been the best format for me to clarify and fine-tune my ideas.

But as I've tested audio and video AI tools, it got me thinking: How difficult would it be to generate an audio version of our newsletter?

The answer, as it turned out, was not difficult at all.

Not only was the process easier and faster than I expected (less than 25 minutes), it was also cheaper ($0).

And now that I have a process in place, it takes me less than five minutes to turn the draft you were reading here into the one you can listen to here. So here it is: the tools and process laid out step-by-step.

Note: To generate a casual podcast-style conversation between two AI-generated voices, try out NotebookLM from Google. For audio generation of an exact script, keep reading.  

Step 1. Sign up for a free account of ElevenLabs.  

There are number of text-to-speech tools on the market now, but ElevenLabs has been making headlines for its ease of use, its conversational, contextually aware AI voices, and its ability to create AI voice clones.

A free account gives you up to 10 minutes of audio per month; a Starter account of $5/mo includes 30 minutes of audio per month. ElevenLabs also offers localization, AI voiceovers, and a reader app for book and PDF narration.

Step 2. Paste the newsletter text into the window.

Currently, ElevenLabs has a limit of 5000 characters for a single text generation in order to maintain accuracy.

Step 3. Preview different AI voices and choose what best fits your project.

The “narration” category of voices seemed to best fit the tone for the growthcurve newsletter. Of these voices, I chose Matilda, an American woman's voice. (ElevenLabs also offers voice cloning, which I've opted not to use.)

Step 4. Review and edit the copy (optional).  

There was some formatting in our newsletter copy that didn't translate to audio. I simply read through the draft and revised these lines to make more sense when read aloud.

I've noticed, though, that ElevenLabs will automatically convert text such as "groceries (e.g. apples and bananas)" to "groceries — for example, apples and bananas" in order to sound like more natural narration.  

Step 5. Click “Generate.”  

ElevenLabs started reading my text aloud almost immediately and the sample of 2,929 words was fully processed in less than 30 seconds.

Step 6. Listen to the audio. Make changes and regenerate if necessary.  

This is where I noticed those formatting errors, so I was able to revise and then re-generate the audio. I also listened to the full text to confirm accuracy and logical cadence.

Step 7. Download the audio file.

The audio file defaults to mp3, and my 3 minutes, 11 seconds of audio was merely 3.1 MB.

Step 8. Upload the audio file to HubSpot.

We use HubSpot as our marketing platform, so I navigated to the file section, uploaded the mp3 file, and copied the URL of that file.

(At this stage, I briefly looked at ElevenLab’s support documents to see what options I had for embedding or linking the audio file.)

Step 9. Added the link to the newsletter.

Now this is where I could have gone a couple of different directions. I could have embedded the audio file directly into the email, but that could hurt deliverability.  

I also could have linked to a landing page where the audio file is housed. I might go this route in the future, but for now, I opted to link directly to the audio.  

Step 10. Send a test email.

At this point, I sent myself a test email, verified that the link and mp3 file worked, and the newsletter was ready to go!

• Initial testing time for the steps above: About 25 minutes
• Time for subsequent emails: Under 5 minutes

And just like that, I can offer you, our subscribers, newsletter content in another format — for just five additional minutes of time.

Interested in ElevenLabs? Sign up free here.

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