Podcast hosting platform Buzzsprout has announced the launch of Cohost AI, a new artificial intelligence tool that aims to help podcasters get rid of time-consuming tasks.
With this tool, podcasters will supposedly be able to focus on the content of the episodes rather than technical details, with Cohost generating episode titles, episode descriptions, chapter markers, and transcriptions. Podcasters will then be able to view this content to review and adjust before publishing.
Cohost AI is an add-on that podcasters can pay for monthly in addition to their hosting plan. The costs vary depending on the length of the content, starting with $10 per month (£8.09) for 3 hours and going up to $30 per month (£24.27) for 12 hours.
Once podcasters enable Cohost AI on their accounts, the software will automatically process new audio files after they’re uploaded and provide a summary page with all the episode details provided and accessible for the user to adjust the content.
This AI-powered tool is created in partnership between Buzzsprout and software company Podium, which is known for providing a number of AI podcast tools that can generate shownotes, chapters, transcripts, highlight clips and keywords, and create social media posts.
The use of AI in podcasts has become an increasingly popular tool for a number of podcast platforms including iHeartMedia’s podcast hosting platform Omny Studio, which partnered with AI company Sounder to enhance brand suitability and safety through analysing the content and context of podcast episodes. Wondery and Katz Digital have also partnered with Barometer recently to ensure greater brand suitability for advertisers through the platform’s AI podcast analysis tools.
During a session on AI at The Podcast Show which took place last week, Sean King, senior vice president of AI company Veritone, stated that AI is “not here to displace work, it’s here to accelerate work” and that podcasters can benefit from AI by using this technology to pick up menial tasks such as the ones that Cohost AI is aimed at. However, it shouldn’t be used to do 100% of the work, he added, as podcasting still needs a human touch.
Rethink Audio managing director Matt Hill echoed that statement in the latest episode of PodPod, saying that his company has previously used AI in the Retrospectors podcast to automatically generate show notes in order to save time.
“We record six in a recording session, it goes out six days a week, so you've got to write six loads of show notes - and that's a lot of show notes,” said Hill. “And so what we found is that if we just basically take the transcript of the show, which is 10 minutes long, feed that into [Google’s generative AI chatbot] Bard, and say ‘summarise this into some show notes’. That's a good first draft, and then we can sort of work from that into making it and shaping it how we need it to be, but it probably takes maybe 10 minutes of the time of making one show note.”
“We can maybe save ourselves an hour, hour and a half a week. That's great to have that time back and that's really only come in the last two or three months.”
