Industry Spotlight – behind the scenes in Podcasting with Acast CEO, Ross Adams

In our new Industry Spotlight column, Ross Adams from Acast gives us an insight to podcasting. This month he’s looking at podcast connections to Artificial Intelligence and asks – yayI or nayI?

The Pod Bible team has given me a monthly column to discuss everything behind the scenes in the podcast industry. Calling it an “industry” still feels weird to me, as compared to TV, Radio and Film, Podcasting is practically a baby. But it’s thanks to people like the hardworking team behind Pod Bible; Podcasting is a dynamic, fast-paced and everchanging medium that basically has us all obsessed.

My name is Ross Adams, and I’m the CEO of Acast – the world’s largest independent podcast platform and home to the most valuable podcast marketplace. We help podcast creators earn value for their podcasts through ads, sponsorship and branded content.

This month I want to address something that’s been on the lips of the whole industry for a while now; AI. Yes, that two-letter acronym that can either strike fear or excite you.

Well, I’m here to tell you, for the time being anyway, that AI technology is nothing to be afraid of, and the work being done with AI in podcasting is genuinely groundbreaking. Yes, you might read headlines around ‘podcasts completely written and recorded by AI’, but at Acast, we still believe stories created by humans, for humans, make the creator economy so powerful and podcasts and podcast advertising so effective.

AI is nothing new to Acast; we have been using tools and developing products that incorporate AI for a while. So how is the wider podcast industry using AI? When it comes to creating a podcast, AI is particularly powerful when it can remove time spent on administrative efforts for creators and afford them more time to focus on what they do best: create incredible podcasts for you to listen to. There are also some brilliant examples of AI helping creators expand their audience, for example, across language barriers with AI translations. Some companies are even using AI to make podcaster’s jobs much easier. For instance, Headliner creates video clips from episodes. Uses AI to generate captions, select relevant images, and add visual effects to create videos for social media platforms.

If you’re not using Podchaser yet to discover your next great podcast (whilst reading Pod Bible, of course), then you’re missing out on another way that AI can help you, the podcast listeners. Podchaser uses natural language processing (a form of AI) to analyse episodes, show descriptions, and listener reviews to generate detailed metadata that enables audiences to discover podcasts based on specific topics, genres, or even specific guests. Basically, Podchaser will find the next big podcast for you to dive into.

Behind the scenes in the podcast advertising world, we use AI to assist in creating meaningful insights from things like listener data to improve the podcast advertising experience. Acast’s product development team uses AI to become more efficient and deliver more value to its customers, which are the brands and advertisers supporting all the podcast creators. I’m proud to say we were early adopters of the potential of AI in our product capabilities. For example, combining transcription with machine learning allows us to provide contextual-based advertising through keywords and content categorisation. We call this conversational targeting.

If that all sounds complicated, fear not, it’s what most content platforms – social media or video streaming – use to tailor their algorithms to specific users. We believe there is a place for AI within podcasting when used to enhance that human storytelling experience rather than replace it.

I promise you this column has not been written by the AI Bot 4000, but I would say that wouldn’t I?

Main image Ross Adams courtesy of Acast.

This article was created in partnership with Acast – the world’s largest independent podcast platform and home to the most valuable podcast marketplace. Acast helps podcast creators earn value for their podcasts through ads, sponsorship and branded content. Find out more at acast.com.