Chatty bots share their hot opinions on hundreds of thousands of AI-powered podcasts. And the invasion has just begun.
While their banter may be a little corny, the confidence and research of AI podcasters is arguably better than most humans right now.
“We're just starting to cross the threshold that voice AI is virtually indistinguishable from human AI,” said Alan Cowan, chief executive of Hume AI, a startup specializing in voice technology. “We see creators using it in a variety of ways.”
Industry insiders say artificial intelligence can make podcasts sound better and lower costs, but a growing swarm of new competitors entering an already crowded market is disrupting the industry.
Some podcasters are pushing back, demanding restrictions. Others are already cloning their voices and outsourcing podcasts to AI bots.
Popular podcast host Stephen Bartlett used an artificial intelligence clone to launch a new kind of content aimed at the 13 million subscribers of his podcast Diary of a CEO. On YouTube, his clone says: “100 CEOs Wwith Stephen Bartlett,“, which adds artificial intelligence-generated animation to Bartlett's cloned voice to tell the life stories of entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Richard Branson.
Erica Mandy, host of the Redondo Beach-based daily news podcast The Newsworthy, let an artificial voice replace her earlier this year after she lost her voice to laryngitis and had her backup host help out.
She fed her script into a text-to-speech model and selected a female AI voice from ElevenLabs. speak for her.
“I still recorded the show in my very raspy voice, but then I overdubbed it with an AI voice, telling the audience right from the start: I’m sick,” Mandy said.
Mandy previously used ElevenLabs for its voice isolation feature, which uses artificial intelligence to remove ambient noise during interviews.
The host of her chatbot caused mixed reactions from listeners. Some asked if she was okay. One fan said she should never do that again. Most didn't know what to think.
“A lot of people said, ‘That was weird,’” Mandy said.
In podcasting, many listeners feel a strong connection with the hosts they listen to regularly. The slow adoption of AI voices for one-off episodes, reading pre-made commercials, replacing sentences in post-production, or translating into multiple languages has sparked anger as well as curiosity from content creators and consumers alike.
Augmenting or replacing host readings with artificial intelligence is seen by many as a breach of trust and a simplification of the human connections between listeners and hosts, according to Megan Lazowick, vice president of Edison Research, a podcast research company.
Jason Saldaña of PRX, a podcast network that features human creators like Ezra Klein, said the tsunami of AI podcasts won't attract premium advertising rates.
“Adding more podcasts under the tyranny of choice is not a good thing,” he said. “I’m not interested in devaluing the premium.”
However, platforms such as YouTube and Spotify presented functions so that creators can clone their voice and translate their content into multiple languages to increase reach and revenue. A new generation of voice cloning companies, many of which operate in California, are offering better emotion, tone, tempo and overall voice quality.
Hume AI, which is based in New York but has a large research team in California, raised $50 million last year and has tens of thousands of creators using its software to create audiobooks, podcasts, movies, video scoring and dialogue 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 restore a sentence in the same voice, prosody or emotional tone using instant cloning,” said company CEO Cowen.
Some are using this technology to bombard the market with content.
Los Angeles-based podcast studio Inception Point AI has produced 200,000 podcast episodes, which in some weeks represents 1% of all podcasts published online that week, according to CEO Janine Wright.
Podcasts are so cheap to produce that they can focus on small topics such as local weather, small sports teams, gardening and other niche topics.
Instead of a studio looking for a specific “hit” podcast idea, it only costs $1 to create an episode, so they can be profitable with as few as 25 people listening.
“What this means is that most of what we do, we really have unlimited experimentation and creative freedom for what we want to do,” Wright said.
One of its popular synthetic hosts is Vivian SteeleAn AI celebrity gossip columnist with a sassy voice and a sharp tongue. “I am truly controlled by artificial intelligence, which means I have receipts older than your grandmother’s jewelry box and a memory sharper than a hairpin on marble. I don’t forget, I don’t forgive, and I definitely don’t filter,” the AI reveals itself at the beginning of the podcast.
“We've kind of tailored it to what the audience wants,” said Katie Brown, director of content at Inception Point, which helps create the personalities of AI-powered podcasters.
Inception Point has compiled a list of over 100 AI personalities whose characteristics, voices, and personas are tailored for podcast audiences. Its AI hosts include Claire Delish, a culinary expert and gardening enthusiast. Nigel Thistledown.
This technology also allows you to create podcasts quickly and easily. Inception has had some success by quickly posting flash biographies of people featured in the news. It uses artificial intelligence software to identify a trending personality and create two episodes with promotional art and a trailer.
When Charlie Kirk was shot, his AI immediately created two shows calledDeath of Charlie Kirk” And “Charlie Kirk Manhunt” as part of a biographical series.
“We were able to create all this content, each from a different angle, using different news sources, and we were able to create this content within an hour,” Wright said.
Speed is critical when it comes to breaking news, which is why AI podcasts have reached the top of some charts.
“Our content was coming up, really dominating the list of what people were searching for,” she said.
On Apple and Spotify, Inception Point podcasts have amassed 400,000 subscribers.
