The Gap That Needed Filling
I've been in the Sitecore ecosystem long enough to see the platform evolve from a monolithic CMS into a genuine DXP platform. With each release, over time Sitecore got smarter, more modular and more flexible. But there's always been this gap, that space between "what Sitecore does out of the box" and "what our clients actually need."
Few years back, webhooks gave us event-driven architecture. The Authoring APIs opened content operations programmatically. These were real improvements, but when it came to actual platform customizations or extensions, there was still a missing piece.
XM Cloud was allowing us to deploy custom container images on top of the base platform, but here's the tension: in a SaaS world, that approach comes with baggage. Any custom image you deploy introduces potential breaking changes down the line. When Sitecore pushes an upgrade, whether it's security patches, performance improvements, or new features, you're suddenly wondering if your customizations will break. It goes against every best practice we preach about cloud-native development.
That's where Sitecore Marketplace Apps come in, and it's a game-changer.
How We Got Here
I'm lucky to have been part of this from day zero. Last year at the Sitecore Symposium in Nashville, I had some conversations with the Sitecore Marketplace team about where the platform was heading. Those conversations turned into an opportunity to get early access and actually started building something together.
We began working closely with the Sitecore team and my colleagues on building the Content Transfer app, giving input on everything as we built the app. Being part of the first wave of developers to actually ship apps on the marketplace taught us invaluable lessons about what works, what doesn't, and what's possible when you build with the platform's constraints in mind.
The Marketplace App Vision
For those who haven't kept up with Sitecore's latest initiatives, the Marketplace is your trusted hub for discovering and building curated, ready-to-use extensions that enhance the DXP. It's the modern way to extend Sitecore, and it's fundamentally different from the old custom development game.
Here's what makes it powerful: Marketplace apps are modular, plug-and-play solutions built using Sitecore's Marketplace SDK and APIs. They integrate into extension points throughout Sitecore (Pages, Dashboards, Cloud Portal), without ever touching the core platform. No custom container images. No upgrade risk. No technical debt accumulation. They're built with modern JavaScript/TypeScript frameworks, versioned in GitHub, and can be deployed independently of Sitecore's own release cycle.
From a business perspective, that's huge. It means organizations can customize Sitecore for their specific needs without freezing themselves in place. From a developer perspective, it means we can build meaningful experiences using SDKs and a standardized extensibility framework. We're not reinventing wheels, we're building on a solid foundation that plays by cloud-native rules.
Why I Built a Text-to-Speech App
A client came to us evaluating multiple DXP platforms for their digital transformation. They had a clear requirement: text-to-speech functionality to convert written content into high-quality audio for accessibility, podcasts, and voice assistants. It was a legitimate use case, and they needed to see it in action.
SitecoreAI doesn't natively provide TTS. Sitecore Agents might be an option down the road, but I needed something faster, something I could build and demo quickly to show not just that we could solve their problem, but that we could do it elegantly using Sitecore's extensibility model.
That's when it hit me: this was the perfect showcase for Marketplace apps. Here was a real customer need that could be solved with a self-contained extension, built with official SDKs, and deployed independently. It proved a point I wanted to demonstrate: extensibility in Sitecore has fundamentally changed. You don't need deep platform modifications or custom deployments anymore. You can build powerful features using standardized tooling.
So I built a Text-to-Speech app for the Sitecore Marketplace.
The app lets content creators generate natural-sounding audio directly from within their DXP environment. Whether it's blog posts, product descriptions, or web copy, they can produce audio variants on-demand without leaving Sitecore. It integrates cleanly, respects the content model, and leverages existing Sitecore APIs. For the customer, it was proof of concept. For me, it was validation that building for the Marketplace with the right SDKs and starter kits makes extensibility feel effortless.
The App Implementation
Content Extraction
The app automatically extracts text content from SitecoreAI Pages by analyzing the rendered layout. It identifies content sections and presents them in an organized, selectable format. This extraction happens in real-time as users navigate through pages in SitecoreAI Pages.
Provider Flexibility
One of the key architectural decisions was to support multiple text-to-speech providers. The app includes:
- Browser TTS: A free option for quick previews, using the browser's built-in Web Speech API
- Premium Providers: Support for OpenAI, Google Cloud, Azure Cognitive Services, ElevenLabs, and Amazon Polly
This provider-agnostic approach ensures flexibility, teams can choose the service that best fits their quality requirements, budget, and language needs. The architecture abstracts provider differences behind a unified interface, making it easy to add new providers or switch between them.
Content Hub Integration
The app doesn't just generate audio, it integrates directly with Sitecore Content Hub for asset management. Generated audio files are automatically uploaded, published, and their rendition URLs are made available for use in Sitecore Pages fields. This creates a complete workflow: from text content to published audio asset, all within the Sitecore ecosystem.
Key Features
Selective Content Conversion
Not all content needs to be converted. The app allows content creators to select specific sections using an intuitive checkbox interface. This granular control ensures that only relevant content is converted, maintaining quality and reducing processing time.
Multi-Language Support
The app automatically detects the page language and filters available voices accordingly. This ensures that Spanish content uses Spanish voices, French content uses French voices, and so on. The language detection happens seamlessly, requiring no manual configuration.
Podcast Generation
For more advanced use cases, the app includes podcast generation capabilities using ElevenLabs' built-in podcast features. This enables content creators to produce professional-quality podcasts directly from their Sitecore content, with AI-optimized voice settings that create natural, engaging audio experiences.
Automatic Context Awareness
The app automatically reloads when page context changes, when users navigate to a different page, switch languages, or view different revisions. This ensures that the content being converted always matches what's currently displayed in the editor.
Conclusion
This Text-to-Speech Marketplace App demonstrates the power of the composable DXP approach. By creating a focused, specialized tool that integrates seamlessly with Sitecore, we've enabled content teams to extend their content strategy without complex custom development.
The architecture is flexible, the user experience is intuitive, and the integration is seamless. Most importantly, it solves a real problem for content creators while maintaining the principles of composability and extensibility that define modern SaaS DXP.
As we continue to explore what's possible with SitecoreAI, tools like this showcase how marketplace apps can extend platform capabilities in meaningful ways. The future of content management isn't just about managing content, it's about transforming it, repurposing it, and making it accessible in whatever format users prefer.
Have you built for the Sitecore Marketplace? Or are you thinking about it? Drop a comment or reach out, I'd love to hear what you're working on.
