Learn how to add text and have words highlighted individually once an audio file is played.

Text-to-speech is a useful automated feature in readers. However, it fails when you want a natural reading voice especially for children story books. This is where recording your own narration comes in handy.

The new Audio Sync tool allows you to add your own narration audio, while at the same time syncing each word to its respective word text. This way each word text is highlighted at the right time, while the audio is playing.

Prepare Your Content

To create a synced audio component, you need to prepare two pieces of items.

  1. Your audio narration, either as a local audio file, or an online URL, in MP3 format.
  2. The text. This text shouldn't be already existing on the page, but is to be entered separately.

Add Your Content

  1. Click on the Audio Sync button in the panel on the right. The Insert/Edit Synced Audio window will appear.
  2. Select your audio as either an online URL or a local file. For tips on the advantages of each, please see Adding Audio.
  3. Enter your text in the content field. The text can take formatting of your liking.

Sync the Audio

  1. Click on the Syncing tab.
  2. A requirement is to have both audio and text selected in the Content tab. If you haven't done that, you will be restricted from continuing with the syncing.
    As the instructions explain, once you hit Start, you will starting listening to the audio narration, and hit spacebar each time you hear the end of each word.
  3. Click the Start button. You will see a countdown timer to get ready.
  4. Hit the spacebar every time the word you hear is completed said. The next word will be highlighted in red.
  5. Once you've reached the last word, or the audio has completed playing, you will be informed that the syncing is complete. You may preview it to examine its accuracy, or start over.

Control the Appearance

  1. Click on the Apperaance tab.
  2. Control the formatting of the highlighted word using the color, scale factor, or text underline option. For general formatting of the text, you can only do that from the Content tab.
  3. Select the alignment of the play button (centered by default).