AI and Podcasting

This newsletter edition was not written by AI but it was inspired by it. You see, recently I’ve been spending more and more time using tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Notion AI for everyday tasks. It started with simple things like helping summarise and query my book notes, or troubleshoot some coding troubles. But these are pretty trivial tasks for these tools. So I started thinking about how they could become part of the podcasting workflows that are more complex and bespoke.

Today I want to share some practical ideas for how you can use AI as part of your podcasting workflow that I think will have a big impact on your output, save you time, and hopefully make your podcasting experience more enjoyable.

Perhaps one of the most time consuming parts of podcasting is getting a transcription. Well, I’ve found a fantastic app called MacWhisper which does an excellent job of locally transcribing (no sending to external servers) your podcasting recording. I’ve used it with clients and can highly recommend it.

A transcript it great but it’s also a fantastic starting point for generating show notes, a bulleted list of topics talked about, even asking for the URLs of things mentioned. All of this can be done within MacWhisper or by copying and pasting the transcript into ChatGPT.

If you’re one of the amazing people that bought my Notion Podcast Production Dashboard you can put that transcript into your dashboard and use Notion’s built-in AI to do the same thing. You can ask Notion AI (or ChatGPT) to generate questions to ask a guest.

Another AI tool that I’ve seen used is from Adobe and it’s called Enhance Speech. It’s one of the best audio cleanup and enhancing products I’ve ever heard and it’s becoming my go-to for fixing poorly recorded audio. It’s saved me, a professional audio editor, so much time. I’ve had clients send me their guest’s audio which might be OK. I’ve run it through this tool and it sounds like it was professional recorded. You really have to hear it to believe it.

These are all fantastic tools to have right now, and I’ve not even covered artwork generation either using DALL·E, or Midjourney.

There are already plenty more AI tools that are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Voice cloning is getting better and better and I think in the not-too-distant future podcasters will be able to have create their own voice clone and have it read a script, completely removing the need to sit in front of a microphone and record. Imagine that, a podcast without the need for any recording.

I’d love to know your thoughts about AI in podcasting so feel free to hit reply to this one and let me know!