Utilising AI in creating your podcast

There are so many AI tools coming out now, especially in the world of podcasting, and they can help you with getting started.

Sean Duncombe, Founder of Podcast AI spoke about how you can use ChatGPT to get ideas. Asking it certain questions about things going on in the industry as well as using old show content to prompt it to give you new ideas for the same topic that worked well. He also spoke about AI Chat, which you can build into your website, to help you generate feedback from users, which could then turn into unique content for your podcast.

Lauren Ingram, Founder of Next Big Thing also added that these tools are good but should only be used as a co-pilot. She also mentioned Perplexity which is good if you’re looking for facts, as they are referenced with links throughout to know that they're true.

Ingram then went onto say, that if you’re wanting to start a podcast, you can ask ChatGPT what podcast exists out there in the topic you want to cover and where there might be a gap for you. She also stated, “Google Gemini is probably better than ChatGPT when asking what trends are going on within the industry” to help you with content ideas for your podcast episodes, but continued to state how AI shouldn’t be the final version of thing.

Zara Paul, Founder of Choppity, then added, “It's something that we continually say. A lot of people start dabbling with AI tools and expect AI to be able to do everything for you. It won't, AI is pretty good at a first pass. But a human eye should always be the final thing to look at it before it goes through production.”

AI helping the recording of your podcast

When recording a podcast, as a host, you’re always worried about the sound of your voice and making sure there is no background noise that will make the recording sound horrible. The panel then dug into how AI can be used to help this worry.

Duncombe started with saying, “There is lots of companies out there that can help, including AI acoustics which can enhance your audio within the process.” He then continues to say, “what AI does is basically stabilises your voice and then enhances it in the process. Which means that even if you record off your computer, on Zoom, you can have a very good, enhanced version.”

Duncombe then moves onto the video side of things saying, “There are also tools out there to help enhance your videos too, like DaVinci, that will enhance your video and your quality of editing, and these tools are accessible to everyone.”

AI voice

The conversation then moved onto the topic of AI voice cloning and how this can affect people, especially podcasters.

Ingram stated, “The voice cloning is really interesting, and I don’t think people know how easy it is to clone a voice really well on limited data.” Saying, “as a host, your voice is being used, and from a scammers point of view, there’s hours of audio of your voice online which anyone could easily rip off.”

She then goes on to say, “It feels like we're just at the beginning of just having conversations about this stuff and how does it matter? Who owns this IP? How do we want to manage this stuff?” Bringing out more questions than answers but with the AI voice cloning being so new, it’s a never-ending conversation to be having on the ethics of AI.

Zara Paul then added, “It can be quite scary as well, when you think of it like that. I also think there's a whole bunch of legality, but I don't think any of us are necessarily qualified to speak about. But I also think that it can be incredibly beneficial. When you speak about AI and voice training being used to dub for example and make content more accessible to people. Most of the content that we have is English spoken content. Most of the AI that we have is optimised for English. And it means that in the English speaking world is really well served. But there's all the rest of the world that doesn't necessarily have access to the same resources, the same information to the same educational content that the English speaking world have access to. And voice dubbing can be an access point for that.”

AI to help post-production

After making a podcast you want to get it out there as far and wide as you can. Using social media and newsletters is a good way of doing this.

Zara Paul started this conversation off saying, “A lot of people start the podcast, they spend a lot of time in the prep of it, and they spend a lot of time and effort in the actual production of it. Then they distributed it and sit and wait for something to happen. And I think that's a pretty big mistake. It's so important to keep the conversation going.”

Duncombe then added, “An audio piece has the ability to respond one piece of audio into lots of different types of content.” This includes, press releases from your transcript and trailers from your video. He then adds, “There is lots of AI tools out there to help with short edits, creating a blog and adding captions on videos.”

In this AI panel we learnt how AI can help you make your podcast from start to finish, but that it shouldn’t be the main process, and more of a co-pilot, as the human eye still needs to be involved in the process. Overall, AI is here to help speed the process up but not to take the human aspect away.