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 keeping with Podcast Trade Insights. And people are simply those we find out about.

“A variety of podcasters aren’t even going via the massive platforms now. They’re going direct to their listeners, promoting premium content material and having large 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. Each piece of content material must be produced and distributed, whether or not by audio professionals or of us studying the craft. Due to this fact, the extra they’ll automate massive swaths of manufacturing, the extra they’ll concentrate on the content material.

“The totally different locations audio is being revealed have simply exploded,” explains Jonathan Wyner chief engineer at M Works Mastering and a professor at Berklee School of Music in Boston. “With all these contexts, there’s a actual motivation and crucial for creators to be extra versatile.”

To not point out, extra productive and environment friendly.

The Rise of AI

Synthetic intelligence (AI) — software program that may automate duties beforehand finished by people — holds the important thing to dealing with the tsunami of podcast content material. Not solely can AI pace up manufacturing, it may possibly make podcasts sound higher and set the stage for the audio experiences of tomorrow.

“AI mainly helps maintain repetitive duties to quicken the workflow of the podcaster,” explains Manos Chourdakis, analysis engineer at Nomono, which develops AI-based podcasting instruments. “For instance, with AI, you don’t should hearken to a complete podcast to search out the place somebody stated one thing mistaken, then change or take away it. You may try this your self, however AI does it quicker.”

Then there are chores that may solely be achieved with AI — at the least at scale, equivalent to eradicating noise or enhancing dialogue. “Good-quality dialogue enhancement can be unattainable with out AI,” Chourdakis says. “At the very least unattainable in an affordable timeframe utilizing conventional instruments.”

Excellent for Menial Duties

Purposes of AI in podcasting are as different as manufacturing duties. Some are constructed immediately 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 instrument that may assist scale back the mind-numbing bits of a job is an effective factor,” 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 friends. “You’ll at all times want that human experience component, however quickly machines may study to know what makes a podcast attention-grabbing and scale back time on activity.”

Resolution supplier Descript applies AI to many points of podcast engineering, together with noise elimination and echo management. One of many extra “mind-numbing” chores Descript can deal with is room tone.

“Generally producers have to insert digital silence right into a podcast. Perhaps between edits or to pull out the spacing between sentences,” says Jay LeBoeuf, head of enterprise and company growth at Descript. “However that sounds extremely unnatural.”

If producers didn’t seize room tone when a podcast was recorded, they might have to return and get it. Or they’ll hear 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 know-how not solely obviates menial duties, it permits for larger manufacturing flexibility.

“AI goes to permit us to make use of inexpensive {hardware}, worse-sounding rooms, and noisier places and nonetheless get good outcomes,” says Nomono’s Chourdakis.

New AI-Based mostly 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) instrument helps podcasters discover copyright-free music based mostly on songs they like.

“Say you’re in search of intro or outro music, and also you’re considering of a selected track, nevertheless it’s protected by copyright,” says Chourdakis. “The system makes use of AI beneath the hood that can assist you discover one thing related.”

At Bwlb, Taylor’s group developed Accordion, an AI-based answer that may take a podcast and reproduce it at varied lengths.

“Each different a part of our life is getting smarter — sensible properties, sensible fridges,” Taylor says. “Individuals need extra management and comfort from their podcast expertise, too.”

When Taylor labored on documentaries for the BBC, he’d be requested for shorter variations to run on totally different platforms. The method was at all times handbook. Accordion applies software program algorithms to podcast content material to intelligently create variations of various lengths. “It doesn’t pace something up,” Taylor says, “nevertheless it offers the consumer management over the length of the content material with out shedding tone construction or listenability.”

Placing the Give attention to Immersive Storytelling

The extra podcasters use AI instruments, the higher they turn out to be. In different phrases, the extra information 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 train the AI instruments find out how to generate higher sound. “Podcasters shouldn’t want superior audio information to provide high-quality audio,” says Chourdakis. “By automating a few of these duties, they’ll spend extra time specializing in nice storytelling, and fewer time on tedious clean-up duties.”

And sooner or later, they’ll evolve extra simply to create a brand new style of immersive, spatial podcasts. For instance, Nomono’s know-how 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 manufacturing is now coming into a section the place when you can dream it, it may possibly occur,” says Descript’s LeBoeuf. “And also you now not have to have an costly studio or a long time of coaching to perform your objectives.”