Roughly talking, about 22,000 new podcasts are launched in a month. There are near 2.5 million (greater than 71 million episodes) within the Apple Podcasts listing proper now, in response to Podcast Industry Insights. And these are simply those we learn about.
“A lot of podcasters aren’t even going through the big platforms now. They’re going direct to their listeners, selling premium content and having big success,” says Andy Taylor, previously of BBC Radio and founding father of Cardiff-based R&D consultancy Bwlb.
And that’s to say nothing of the rising quantity of podcast-like content material, whether or not created by manufacturers for promotion or occasion producers that need, for instance, to make talks out there on-demand. Every piece of content material must be produced and distributed, whether or not by audio professionals or of us studying the craft. Therefore, the extra they’ll automate massive swaths of manufacturing, the extra they’ll concentrate on the content material.
“The different places audio is being published have just exploded,” explains Jonathan Wyner chief engineer at M Works Mastering and a professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston. “With all those contexts, there is a real motivation and imperative for creators to be more versatile.”
Not to say, extra productive and environment friendly.
The Rise of AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) — software program that may automate duties beforehand accomplished by people — holds the important thing to dealing with the tsunami of podcast content material. Not solely can AI velocity up manufacturing, it might probably make podcasts sound higher and set the stage for the audio experiences of tomorrow.
“AI basically helps take care of repetitive tasks to quicken the workflow of the podcaster,” explains Manos Chourdakis, analysis engineer at Nomono, which develops AI-based podcasting instruments. “For example, with AI, you don’t have to listen to a whole podcast to find where someone said something wrong, then replace or remove it. You could do that yourself, but AI does it faster.”
Then there are chores that may solely be completed with AI — at the very least at scale, comparable to eradicating noise or enhancing dialogue. “Good-quality dialogue enhancement would be impossible without AI,” Chourdakis says. “At least impossible in a reasonable timeframe using traditional tools.”
Perfect for Menial Tasks
Applications of AI in podcasting are as various as manufacturing duties. Some are constructed straight into podcast platforms. When creators add their podcasts to internet hosting platform Podcast.co, the system mechanically “listens” to the audio recordsdata and normalizes sound ranges.
“Any tool that can help reduce the mind-numbing bits of a job is a good thing,” says Mike Cunsolo, the platform’s co-founder. Cunsolo additionally runs Cue, a podcast manufacturing firm working with company manufacturers, and Matchmaker.fm, which connects podcast producers with company. “You’ll always need that human expertise element, but soon machines could learn to understand what makes a podcast interesting and reduce time on task.”
Solution supplier Descript applies AI to many features of podcast engineering, together with noise elimination and echo management. One of the extra “mind-numbing” chores Descript can deal with is room tone.
“Sometimes producers need to insert digital silence into a podcast. Maybe between edits or to drag out the spacing between sentences,” says Jay LeBoeuf, head of enterprise and company growth at Descript. “But that sounds incredibly unnatural.”
If producers didn’t seize room tone when a podcast was recorded, they might have to return and get it. Or they’ll pay attention for it within the recording, copy-and-paste the place wanted, then edit the end result to make it mix naturally.
Or computer systems can deal with it. Descript’s AI-based room tone generator analyzes a recording, identifies the room tone, and mechanically synthesizes it the place it’s wanted. Such expertise not solely obviates menial duties, it permits for higher manufacturing flexibility.
“AI is going to allow us to use less expensive hardware, worse-sounding rooms, and noisier locations and still get good results,” says Nomono’s Chourdakis.
New AI-Based Capabilities
AI additionally opens the door to innovation in podcasting — creating new options that increase the bar for podcasters and listeners. For instance, the Epidemic Audio Reference (EAR) device helps podcasters discover copyright-free music based mostly on songs they like.
“Say you’re looking for intro or outro music, and you’re thinking of a particular song, but it’s protected by copyright,” says Chourdakis. “The system uses AI under the hood to help you find something similar.”
At Bwlb, Taylor’s staff developed Accordion, an AI-based answer that may take a podcast and reproduce it at numerous lengths.
“Every other part of our life is getting smarter — smart homes, smart refrigerators,” Taylor says. “People want more control and convenience from their podcast experience, too.”
When Taylor labored on documentaries for the BBC, he’d be requested for shorter variations to run on totally different platforms. The course of was all the time handbook. Accordion applies software program algorithms to podcast content material to intelligently create variations of various lengths. “It doesn’t speed anything up,” Taylor says, “but it gives the user control over the duration of the content without losing tone structure or listenability.”
Putting the Focus on Immersive Storytelling
The extra podcasters use AI instruments, the higher they turn into. In different phrases, the extra knowledge they ingest, the extra they study.
Nomono’s dialogue enhancement algorithms are based mostly on massive datasets of voice recordings — some clear and intelligible, some much less so — which educate the AI instruments methods to generate higher sound. “Podcasters shouldn’t need advanced audio knowledge to produce high-quality audio,” says Chourdakis. “By automating some of these tasks, they can spend more time focusing on great storytelling, and less time on tedious clean-up tasks.”
And sooner or later, they’ll evolve extra simply to create a brand new style of immersive, spatial podcasts. For instance, Nomono’s expertise permits object-based audio manufacturing, which permits producers to “place” voices in a 3D soundscape or create dynamic variations that may be tailor-made to listeners.
“Media production is now entering a phase where if you can dream it, it can happen,” says Descript’s LeBoeuf. “And you no longer need to have an expensive studio or decades of training to accomplish your goals.”