By launching a suite of four AI-driven audio products, the French publisher aims to attract the next generation of audience and combat rising news fatigue. Its automated audio production tool relies on several AI features but puts journalists in the driving seat.
The rapid advancement of AI is helping more publishers to get into the audio space, especially in the area of automatically-generated, personalised audio.
One example of this comes from the south of France, where the newspaper La Provence’s new audio products transform traditional written journalism into a fluid, immersive audio experience that listeners can integrate into their daily routines.
The publisher decided to embrace audio in order to broaden its audience, said Marie-Béatrice Vinit, Subscription and Distribution Manager at La Provence.
Founded in 1944, La Provence is a regional daily newspaper based in Marseille that publishes eight editions across three southern French counties. With a newsroom of 150 journalists and 450,000 readers every day, it is the biggest media in France’s Provence region.
In 2022, the title was bought by CMA Media, the third-largest private media group in France, whose portfolio includes TV news channels, other newspapers, and digital news titles.
“We have a big media family,” Vinit said, speaking at WAN-IFRA’s Paris AI Forum.
“It means more synergies, but also more investments. La Provence Audio is the fruit of those investments,” she said.
22% of young people listen to podcasts daily
The company’s focus on audio is largely an attempt to attract new audiences in a context where many people are frustrated and fatigued by news. Vinit said that 51 percent of French people express news fatigue.
Moreover, she noted that audio as a format is “booming,” with 22 percent of people aged 15 to 24 listening to podcasts every day.
The audio pivot is a strategic move for a title whose traditional stronghold remains loyal but aging: “Our audience is mainly male, 70-plus, retired, going every day at six o’clock to buy a newspaper,” Vinit said.
La Provence has also had positive experiences with audio before: for instance its podcast about drug traffic in Marseille, Cartel Nord, has attracted more than 2 million listeners.
This, Vinit said, had shown the publisher that there was a big demand for audio, for “something more mobile that you can listen to in your car, or when you are home cooking.”
Introducing ‘La Provence Audio’
The title launched its new audio features in late 2025 under the collective name La Provence Audio.
This includes four audio products that are available on La Provence’s website and app:
- Listen to my article offers a long or shortened version of a particular story, with language that may have been slightly adapted for a better listening experience.
- Top headlines with a summary of the most recent news, updated every hour.
- Topic highlights that capture content from several articles to offer a curated approach, ranging from business and political news to highlighting the best movies currently in cinemas.
- A personalised audio digest where users receive custom audio, tailored to their specified interest areas and based on La Provence’s content.
In line with the original goal of offering content for the car, La Provence’s audio products are also available on Apple’s CarPlay and Android Auto.
AI voices with a ‘human touch’
For the automated audio creation, rather than relying on synthetic voices, La Provence worked with the French AI lab Kyutai to clone the voices of two actors.
Vinit emphasised that the resulting voices sound very authentic and have “a kind of human touch,” despite being AI generated. (Outputs can be listened to on La Provence’s audio page.)
Although the team initially debated using voices with the local accent, they ultimately decided that voices with a more “neutral” French accent would be more suitable for their audio products.
Rather than going to their journalists, they chose actors’ voices for the cloning process partly because “we thought it would be easier, politically speaking, with the newsroom,” Vinit said.
But it turned out that journalists were more enthusiastic about the idea than expected: “When we presented the solution to the newsroom, the first reaction was, ‘I’m willing to give my voice. Why did you not ask me?’”
The tech stack
Listing the various tech elements that power the audio products, Vinit mentioned several AI tools that come into play.
The system processes La Provence’s articles through more than 100 automated rules, as well as having a separate ruleset for “audio atmosphere,” such as jingles and pauses. This is then fed to the tool that creates the AI voices.
For personalised audio, the user’s preferences and history are taken into account, and the system uses the French AI company Mistral’s model for intelligent search and personalisation.
La Provence is the first company in the CMA Media group to have implemented this solution, but it can be easily scaled to other titles in the group, Vinit said.
For journalists working on the audio products, the system includes admin tools where audio outputs can be easily reviewed and altered, for example to fix any possible mispronunciations (which are more likely to happen with names).
Journalists can also prompt the admin tool to generate additional audio content by specifying the referenced articles and the expected length of the audio output.
Plans to increase reach & monetisation
Since the features were launched in September, La Provence has surveyed its readers about their use of the audio products. 80 percent said they were happy with them.
“They liked the voices’ quality. They liked the experience,” Vinit said.
“You have to remember that we are a local newspaper. We haven’t invented a lot of things in the last few years, so this was kind of the ‘innovation of the year’ for us.”
Feedback also showed that readers appreciate the possibility to combine audio with reading, Vinit said.
“I find that super interesting, because it’s not cannibalising the paper. The paper is the core,” she said.
“Then, if you are in your car, for example, you can listen to something, or you can dig into subjects that you couldn’t read.”
The successful launch is only the beginning of La Provence’s audio journey. The title plans to follow closely how audiences use the features and adjust them accordingly, Vinit said.
They have already added an audio version of the daily editorial of the Editor-in-Chief Olivier Biscaye (for which they cloned his voice), and it has been made available on streaming platforms such as Spotify. More audio content is also planned.
Looking ahead to 2026, La Provence plans to continue to scale its reach via streaming platforms, and the team will also explore new B2B use cases.
Monetisation will also be a big focus. Initially, La Provence planned to put the new audio products behind the paywall, but ultimately the strategy was changed and they were made freely available.
“Now we have to think: Do we limit it to our subscribers? Should we include programmatic ads? How much will that give back to us?” Vinit said.
Jean-Philippe Behr
