Case study · heute.at · Vienna

Austrian voice.
Accessibility deadline.
Live by late 2025.

heute.at had to ship editorial audio for accessibility compliance — and to an Austrian audience that would not accept a German-accented voice. BotTalk delivered both. Plug and play.

  • Live since late 2025
  • Vienna · OE24 network
  • Austrian voice · plug-and-play
  • Accessibility-driven

The numbers

What shipped — and what it ruled out.

  1. Late 2025 audio live across heute.at
  2. Plug + play no extensive config required
  3. Austrian dialect criterion · non-negotiable
  4. Predictable flat pricing · no two-month doubling

The customer

Austria's
boulevard daily.

heute.at ↗

heute.at is the digital newsroom of Heute, one of Austria's largest free dailies. It runs inside the OE24 network, published out of Vienna, and reaches an audience that consumes the news in a tone the Austrian market knows on sight — and on sound.

Austrian competitors — Krone, Kurier — were already shipping audio. The accessibility deadline was on the calendar, not on the wish-list. heute.at had no audio set-up. Adding one was no longer optional. The only question was who.

Eighteen months earlier the team had evaluated AWS Polly. The verdict was direct: too German, too expensive, too robotic. A German-accented robot voice was a non-starter on an Austrian site. The team waited.

Market
Austria
Headquarters
Vienna
Network
OE24
Surfaces live
heute.at

What they were fighting

Three fronts. One launch window.

  1. 01 · Accessibility deadline

    Accessibility on the clock.

    EU accessibility requirements were moving from "good practice" to mandatory. No site is truly accessible by default. The team needed an audio reading mode shipped to production — not a roadmap promise — before the window closed.

  2. 02 · The dialect criterion

    An Austrian audience won't accept a German voice.

    The previous evaluation of AWS Polly was killed by the accent itself. On an Austrian boulevard site, a German-coloured TTS voice isn't a small quibble — it's a reason for the audience to walk. Dialect fidelity was the contract's load-bearing column.

  3. 03 · The republishing tax

    Every article update costs another TTS run.

    Boulevard news lives on rapid updates. Naive TTS economics tax that behaviour: every fresh edit triggers a fresh synthesis. Calculated against the publishing rhythm at heute.at, the cost added up fast. The pricing model had to absorb that, not punish it.

The criterion

What won the contract.
What would have lost it.

Pick a voice
from Paderborn,
and the readers
walk.
Alexander Ottitzky · CTO, heute.at

Paderborn stands in for any German city — the accent it carries is the accent an Austrian boulevard audience will not accept. The dialect criterion ruled out the obvious global providers and made BotTalk's Austrian voice the deciding factor, not a feature line.

What they walked away with

Three wins. One operating layer.

  1. 01

    An Austrian voice. Plug and play.

    Dialect, day one.

    The voice quality cleared the editorial bar without months of tuning. When their own custom voice recording hit a crackling artefact, BotTalk's support team fixed it on the same channel that placed the order — no ticket queue, no triage loop.

    • Austrian dialect · production grade
    • "Relatively plug and play"
  2. 02

    Predictable economics.

    Flat, not doubled.

    The pricing model didn't double after two months — a pattern heute.at had seen elsewhere. With boulevard publishing rhythms (frequent updates, frequent re-syntheses), predictable economics matter more than headline rate cards.

    • Fair model · no surprise scaling
    • Survives the republishing rhythm
  3. 03

    A partner. Not a ticket queue.

    Highly recommended.

    Short support channels are the operational difference between a vendor and a partner. Voice tuning, dialect refinement, edge-case triage — all of it sat one chat message away. That changes how a publishing team plans the next quarter.

    • Short channels · same-day fixes
    • Next up: Podcast Studio

In their own words

Relatively plug and play. It works immediately, without extensive configuration. The support — highly recommended.
Alexander Ottitzky
Alexander Ottitzky CTO · heute.at

The rollout

Constraints. Rejection. Setup. Live.

  1. Step 01

    Name the constraints.

    Accessibility on the calendar. Austrian voice, non-negotiable. Republishing rhythm has to survive the pricing model. Three constraints, one launch window.

  2. Step 02

    Rule out the wrong fit.

    An earlier evaluation of AWS Polly fell on the dialect alone: too German, too expensive, too robotic. Cost and quality were secondary; the accent was disqualifying. The team waited for the right voice.

  3. Step 03

    Plug-and-play setup.

    BotTalk shipped a working setup without extensive configuration. When the custom voice recording hit a crackling artefact, the fix landed on the same channel that placed the order — not through a triage queue.

  4. Step 04

    Live across heute.at.

    Audio shipped to production by late 2025. Editorial controls stayed on heute.at's side. Next on the table: Podcast Studio — bundling themed coverage (trial coverage, sports events) into single-episode podcasts.

  • Austrian voice · production grade
  • Vienna · OE24 network
  • Live since late 2025
  • Plug-and-play setup
  • Predictable pricing

Run this play in your newsroom

Talk to Andrey.

No deck. No pitch. Your CMS, your audience, your dialect. Thirty minutes. One call.

Book 30 minutes cal.com/bottalk