AI podcasting is changing the industry

Chatty bots share their takes through hundreds of thousands of AI-generated podcasts. And the invasion has only just begun.

Although their jokes can be a bit trite, AI podcasters’ confidence and research are now arguably better than most people’s.

“We’re just starting to cross the threshold where voice AI is virtually indistinguishable from human,” said Alan Cowen, chief executive of Hume AI, a voice technology startup. “We see creators using it in all kinds of ways.”

AI can make podcasts sound better and less expensive, industry insiders say, but the growing swarm of new competitors entering an already crowded market is disrupting the industry.

Some podcasters are pushing back and calling for restrictions. Others are already cloning their voices and entrusting their podcasts to AI robots.

Popular podcast host Steven Bartlett used an AI clone to launch a new type of content aimed at the 13 million subscribers of his “Diary of a CEO” podcast. On YouTube, his clone says “100 CEOs Wwith Steven Bartlett,” which adds AI-generated animation to Bartlett’s cloned voice to tell the life stories of entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Richard Branson.

Erica Mandy, the Redondo Beach-based host of the daily news podcast “The Newsworthy,” let an AI voice replace her earlier this year after she lost her voice to laryngitis and her backup host was bailed out.

She integrated her storyline into a text-to-speech model and selected a female AI voice from ElevenLabs for speak for her.

“I always recorded the show with my voice very raspy, but then I put the AI ​​voice on it, telling the audience right from the start that I’m sick,” Mandy said.

Mandy had previously used ElevenLabs for its voice isolation feature, which uses AI to remove ambient noise from interviews.

Its chatbot host garnered mixed responses from listeners. Some asked her if she was okay. One fan said she should never do it again. Most didn’t really know what to think.

“A lot of people were like, ‘That was weird,’” Mandy said.

In podcasting, many listeners feel a strong connection with the hosts they listen to regularly. The slow invasion of AI voices for one-off episodes, standardized ad playbacks, sentence replacement in post-production, or translation into multiple languages ​​has sparked anger as well as curiosity among content creators and consumers.

Augmenting or replacing host playbacks with AI is seen by many as a breach of trust and a trivialization of the human connection listeners have with hosts, said Megan Lazovick, vice president of Edison Research, a podcast research company.

Jason Saldanha of PRX, a podcast network that represents human creators such as Ezra Klein, said the tsunami of AI podcasts would not attract premium advertising rates.

“Adding more podcasts in an environment of tyranny of choice is not great,” he said. “I am not interested in a devaluation of premiums.”

However, platforms such as YouTube and Spotify have introduced features for creators to clone their voice and translate their content into multiple languages ​​to increase their reach and revenue. A new generation of voice cloning companies, many operating in California, are offering better emotion, tone, rhythm and overall voice quality.

Hume AI, based in New York but with a large research team in California, raised $50 million last year and has tens of thousands of creators using its software to generate audiobooks, podcasts, films, voiceovers for videos and dialogue generation in video games.

“We’re focusing our platform on the ability to edit content so you can take an existing podcast in post-production and regenerate a phrase with the same voice, with the same prosody or emotional intonation using instant cloning,” said Cowen, the company’s CEO.

Some use technology to bombard the market with content.

Los Angeles podcasting studio Inception Point AI has produced its 200,000 podcast episodes, which represents 1% of all podcasts published on the Internet, according to CEO Jeanine Wright.

Podcasts are so cheap to make that they can focus on small topics, like local weather, small sports teams, gardening and other niche topics.

Instead of a studio chasing a specific “hit” podcast idea, it only takes $1 to produce an episode so it can be profitable with just 25 people listening.

“That means that for most things we create, we have an unlimited amount of experimentation and creative freedom for what we want to do,” Wright said.

One of its popular synthetic hosts is Viviane Steelean AI celebrity gossip columnist with a sassy voice and a sharp tongue. “I am indeed AI-powered, which means I have receipts older than your grandmother’s jewelry box and a memory sharper than a stiletto heel on marble. No forgetting, no forgiving and certainly no filter,” the AI ​​reveals at the start of the podcast.

“We’ve kind of shaped it more based on what the audience wants,” said Katie Brown, head of content at Inception Point, who helps design the personality of AI podcasters.

Inception Point has put together a list of more than 100 AI personalities whose characteristics, voices and likenesses are designed for podcast audiences. Its AI hosts include Clare Delish, a culinary advice expert and gardening enthusiast. Nigel Thistledown.

Technology also makes it easier to quickly distribute podcasts. Inception had some success with quickly released flash biographies relating to the people making the news. It uses AI software to spot a trending personality and create two episodes, complete with promotional artwork and a trailer.

When Charlie Kirk was shot, his AI immediately created two shows called “Charlie Kirk Death” and “Charlie Kirk Manhunt” as part of the biographical series.

“We were able to create all of this content, each from different angles, drawing from different sources of information, and we were able to publish this content in an hour,” Wright said.

Speed ​​is essential when it comes to breaking news, which is why its AI podcasts have reached the top of some charts.

“Our content was getting bigger and bigger, really dominating the list of what people were searching for,” she said.

On Apple and Spotify, Inception Point podcasts now have 400,000 subscribers.