Is AI Taking Over Podcasting? w/ Ian Harris

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (00:02.285)
My guest today is Ian Harris. Welcome Ian. Thank you for coming and talking to me on Tools of the Podcast trade.

Ian Harris (00:09.63)
It's great to be here, thanks so much for having

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (00:32.426)
Thank you. All right, so before we get to what you do, could you tell us who is Ian Harris?

Ian Harris (00:44.086)
Well, I've been building technology things for many, many years. So I love being able to take ideas that people have and build them into something that's actually real, that actually works. So building technology platforms, developing products, managing products, getting them to market and getting them into people's hands. So it's been a fun journey over the last few years and of late, what I've been really interested in is exploring the idea of using AI to try and deliver things in a new and exciting way. And I think that's an interesting

opportunity right now with podcasts. And I've been making podcasts for many, many years. That's been a fun journey either when I was working in broadcasts, so actually delivering podcasts in the old fashioned way by recording them, chatting with people, writing notes, hand editing things. But now we've got an opportunity to do things with AI that allows us to try new things with podcasts. And this is a great podcast to talk about podcasts. So here we

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (01:38.375)
Yeah, and AI for sure. All right, thank you. So I think the excitement is still there even though chat GTP burst on the scene with, you know, we got all excited even though AI has been around for a while, right?

Ian Harris (01:56.542)
It has. Yeah, we've been doing AI things for many years. That's funny. The idea of using machine learning has been around for almost a decade, I guess, even more than a decade. And we've seen some amazing progress from being able to do simple things like recognize numbers on a number plate number or a handwritten number. Remember we used to have scanners with OCR where you could actually get it to try and turn the text into a real thing.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (02:07.779)
Mm -hmm.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (02:21.34)
Yeah.

Yeah, not long ago.

Ian Harris (02:24.864)
And now we're actually starting to change that to do something really interesting, which is to actually generate things. So rather than transforming written words into text, but actually creating something from scratch. And that's quite an exciting change. And I think chat GPT is just the beginning of that kind of journey, isn't

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (02:36.495)
Yes.

Yes, it is, it is. I saw someone demonstrating how to, and I knew it was there, but I hadn't even thought about it, how to create a video using ChatGDP mid -journey and 11 Labs, think it's called. So it's a really exciting time, yeah. All right.

Ian Harris (03:03.861)
It is an exciting

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (03:05.101)
Yeah. Okay. So tell me, how can AI enhance podcasters? especially the small guy, you know, who is just trying to make it. How can, give us three ways AI, artificial intelligence, can assist us to enhance our podcasting to deliver our message more effectively.

Ian Harris (03:31.98)
That's good question. Good question. So the challenge with podcasts is that even though they are an amazing way of reaching an audience, so you have the ability to connect one -on -one with people, they're in your ear, they're listening to you, and we know that humans are much better at taking in information, many humans are much better at taking information in audibly, so being able to listen to them. And I don't know if you've ever tried to reach your audience by sending newsletters, which is a great way of, again, connecting one -on -one.

You still want to send them a whole bunch of text and they might read it, they might not read it, they might scan it. I don't know about you, but it's very difficult to read my newsletters when I'm driving my car, so you know, that's no good. So what am I going to do? Well, I can listen to a podcast. Fantastic. So podcasts are great for reaching an audience, but the problem with audio is that it's a really time intensive thing. If you care about your brand and you care about doing a good job, then if you have particular content you want to get out to an audience,

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (04:15.543)
Yes.

Ian Harris (04:28.842)
You might spend a fair number of hours writing the script in the first place. And then once you've written the script, then you need to get someone to record it. So you need someone that can actually sound decent and record that well with the right equipment. Okay, maybe you can get some basic equipment, get stuff up and going, that's fine. But then you need to edit the actual recording itself. So you need to make it sound good. And then you need to write a description, you need to upload it, you need to post on social media. So all these things take time and effort for delivering any podcast.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (04:41.794)
Mm -hmm.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (04:51.741)
you

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (04:58.43)
Okay.

Ian Harris (04:58.752)
And where AI can start to help us now is to start making some of those areas where humans, it becomes very tedious after a while to keep doing these things repetitively, can take away some of that burden for you. So you can be left with the more creative aspects of making a podcast. And so you can use AI to get a transcription of your podcast and then create a summary of it for the description of the podcast. And that's a great way of saving a whole ton of time of having to re -listen to it and make sure it's okay.

The other opportunity is if it's a scripted podcast, you can get the actual transcript and then get it to check the transcript to make sure you said what you think you were going to say and make sure that it makes sense. Okay, that's a great idea too. And the other area that we've started to explore now is to actually generate the podcasts entirely from scratch by using AI to generate the script. Okay, so now we can start off with a newsletter that you might be putting out once a week and we can turn that into a podcast script.

And we've got pretty good at that now so we can generate podcast scripts. And now we can even voice that podcast script using an AI engine. And that gives us the ability to do all those things almost entirely with AI. So you don't need to have humans involved in the process. Of course, it's nice to check it, nice to add creative content, nice to make sure it's on message. But it does start to take away all that effort and time and basically cost of delivering a podcast by using these new AI engines that enable you to do

So I think we're in a great time for podcasts, not just for real human podcasts, but even podcasts that allow you to do things that would be able to reach an audience that you just wouldn't be able to do if you had to do it the old -fashioned manual

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (06:35.961)
Hmm, okay, that's an interesting thought. But I guess we have faceless videos, so I guess it would be something like that, right?

Ian Harris (06:44.01)
Yes. Well, I mean, if you're listening to a purely audio podcast, but for sure. But if you're listening to, we're even at the point now where you can start to have avatars even voicing the words that you've got already. So now you can have a new person that is in fact delivering a video podcast, for example, that gives you an opportunity to do things that, well, I mean, maybe not always we're meant to be on camera. That's okay.

Maybe you can use that to voice your message in a way that gives people an opportunity to see something that's a little more slick than maybe something you could produce at home. So again, another opportunity to do video podcasts as well. I think we're pretty close there. The ones I've seen are getting better now. They still seem a little bit robotic, the actual video itself, but we're getting closer.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (07:10.425)
All

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (07:33.749)
Okay. But I'm concerned about that. What do you say about the concern that, because podcasting is so personal, right? The host has a personal message, trying to connect to that personal message with someone that it resonates with, right?

Ian Harris (07:44.864)
Hmm. Hmm.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (07:55.574)
If you're advertising a product or service, doesn't AI interfere with that emotional connection with an audience?

Ian Harris (08:08.31)
Yeah, that's a good point. at what point is the audience disconnecting from the actual content and the host itself? I mean, that's a very good point. The challenge for us is, what point do you put that value on that connection to be more than the information itself? So if you love a particular host and you're into the way they talk or the way they interview, it's never gonna replace that particular characteristic of humans for sure.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (08:16.723)
Mm

Ian Harris (08:36.108)
But and so it might just be that the other areas around that AI can help without actually stopping that connection that you have with that host. But in some ways, it's almost like you're developing a new thing again. So it's so for example, we put out a podcast called Wake Up Sydney and the actual podcast goes the actual script for it is generated by looking at what the weather is today, what the what's going on on the trains in Sydney.

and what's going on in the local kind of getting to work the roads and the transport and it puts together a script and it tries to make it a funny amusing kind of thing with a bit of a character to it and it's actually surprisingly good it's actually quite it's actually quite funny I've listened to it every day and I quite often love to it it's quite funny so you definitely can get that sort of connection with a kind of made

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (09:25.551)
Mm -hmm.

Ian Harris (09:31.19)
personality. Now of course there's a lot of humans that are fed into it to make it into what it is. So it's not entirely without its human connection, but it is genuinely generated entirely using AI and yet we still have that connection with it. So in the same way that we connect as humans with things that are not humans, we think everything's a human basically. Every animal we've ever had feels like it's part of the family, right? We kind of put this personality into things that we get familiar with.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (09:36.344)
Yes.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (09:55.171)
Right.

Ian Harris (09:59.69)
And we're now at a point where it is good enough that you start to feel that you kind of slipped over that line of thinking, okay, maybe it is a real person and they're just pretending it's AI. That's the sort of sense you start to get now. So it's getting pretty good. So I think that's a good opportunity to try new things. the main area that I think for us at Pulse Podcasts, where we make podcasts like this, is the opportunity of exploring smaller niches where you can't afford to put out a podcast.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (10:12.74)
Bye.

Ian Harris (10:29.44)
I mean, know, know, the challenge of podcasts is the relentlessness of just getting keep on getting content out. That's the most one of the most important parts of that. And so if you have to keep getting this content out, what's the best way of doing that? Well, if you can't afford to do that every week and it is an expensive exercise, then maybe you can reach a smaller niche audience at much lower cost than you used to be able to do, because now we can use AI to take over some of that some of that work. So I think that's why it's exciting. I mean,

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (10:35.65)
Yes.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (10:55.511)
Mm -hmm.

Ian Harris (10:59.018)
You're never going to replace someone that you already love that is a particular personality and you like their sense of humor. But can you do similar things? Yeah, we're getting pretty close.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (11:05.364)
Bye.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (11:09.277)
Okay, all right, I see that and I understand that. Thank you. All right, so explain to us what you can do, what you do for us as clients and then tell us how we can get in touch with you.

Ian Harris (11:23.67)
Sure. So what we do at Pulse Podcasts is we can help you make a podcast and we can help you advise on what equipment you need or how to record it or how to edit it. We can edit your podcast for you so that if you record it, we can take it and chop it and edit and change it and make it sound better than me trying to splice my sentences together, which is great. But we can also take it a step further. If you are already producing content like a newsletter or a web blog or something like that, and you have

content that you care about that you want to get out to an audience, podcasting is a great way of reaching a new audience, a bigger audience, an audience that's on the move, that is commuting or doing the laundry or doing something else with their time, but wants to hear about the topic that is interesting for you and your company. And so if you want to create a podcast, we can take your newsletter or take your web content. We can turn it into a beautiful script and then we can get a professional voiceover artist to record it for you. No problems.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (12:01.161)
Mm -hmm.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (12:11.785)
All

Ian Harris (12:23.238)
Or we can use AI to voice it as well and then produce an entirely seamless process from having you written your newsletter to being able to deliver that to a new audience for people that really want to hear about what is important for your company. And so Pulse Podcasts, www .pulspodcasts .com is where we're at. And if you want to hear some of the AI podcasts that we're making, you can check out the website and see the podcast showcase.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (12:38.407)
Okay.

Ian Harris (12:51.466)
And you can see some of the podcasts that we're making that are entirely AI generated. And it's quite exciting to see how far that's come now. And we're getting better all the time. We're getting better voices. The scripts are getting better. We're getting better at being able to prompt the AI engines to create the right scripts. And so now we're at a point of being able to create something that's really quite unique and quite interesting. So I'd encourage your listeners to check that out. It's an opportunity.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (13:07.116)
Mm -hmm.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (13:16.515)
Yes, awesome. And we'll put that link in the show notes. You're something you said that had me thinking. So when I first started podcasting, there was a website that had and it's probably it probably still exists and that you could purchase a voice, a voice that's saying what you want them to say and use it as an intro to your podcast. Does this AI use real voice to recreate those voices or

How does that work? Because now I'm thinking.

Ian Harris (13:48.812)
Yeah, it's a good question. Good question. So what it can do is actually listen to your voice or a voice recording of a voice artist and then recreate that saying new words. So it's really a crazy time when we could take your voice and turn that into an AI voice and then be able to re say anything that you would like it to say. And so that's an exciting time when

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (13:55.038)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Ian Harris (14:14.368)
Finally, you don't have to get up in crazy times to talk to people in Australia about what they're doing. You could actually re -voice yourself on a new podcast. Wouldn't that be great?

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (14:22.913)
Wow, wow, I don't know. I kinda like meeting Ian.

Ian Harris (14:29.749)
Well that comes back to that human connection, right?

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (14:30.689)
Right, yeah. Yeah, because this is one of the most exciting things about podcasting for me. Because I interview people from all over the world and I wouldn't otherwise. And yes, I'm not, I kind of, I'm excited about technology, you know, and I'm excited about the way we're going. I'm just a little concerned about, you know, replacing that human element. But of course, yes, there is a place and a market for

other type of content that even I might consume even if it's not a human.

Ian Harris (15:06.578)
absolutely. I mean, you're totally right. We work with all different sorts of brands from multinational corporations to small little businesses. And if you have enough money to produce a beautiful podcast, then we can make a beautiful, handcrafted, human -centered podcast. Absolutely. And we wouldn't use any AI at all in terms of generating the scripts. Even we have content writers that produce scripts and we have voiceover artists. But that's not for everybody.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (15:15.743)
Mm -hmm.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (15:32.005)
Mm -hmm.

Ian Harris (15:35.744)
And I think what really opens this up for is for companies and brands and local councils and local government areas that really don't have the budget to do something really beautiful every week, but they can produce a pretty really, really good quality result every week without having to spend the money that they would otherwise. And so I don't think it takes away that human side of it, but it does open up a new market that might not be there otherwise.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (15:54.023)
Okay.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (16:03.02)
Right, right, okay. Yeah, and I'm not really saying that. I'm just trying to, you

Mix the water up a little bit and hopefully we can have better thought process concerning AI because on the one hand, some people just jump in and try to use it for everything. ChatGTP write me a 800 word blog and they just stick it on the web and hope it works, right? On the other hand, there may be those who said, you know what, I don't really like this, it's just scary and I'm not gonna bother. So it's good to get a good explanation about it

Ian Harris (16:24.332)
Yep, yep, yep.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (16:38.973)
from an expert. So thank you for, yeah.

Ian Harris (16:42.816)
That's a pleasure. It's been lovely talking to

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (16:44.963)
Yeah, so what is Ian grateful for today?

Ian Harris (16:48.918)
Grateful for today. Well, we've had a, we've had a, in Sydney, Australia, we've had a really, really cloudy, cold day. And I'm grateful that in this coming week, it's gonna be much sunnier and much shinier. And I'm gonna get out and see a couple of friends in the next few days and hopefully the sunshine will be shining. I know you guys in Austin are having a bit of a temperature at the moment, is that right? Things are quite warm out there.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (17:13.017)
I looked at the clock at 3 .30 this morning, was 92 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah, we're hot.

Ian Harris (17:17.67)
my goodness, that's crazy. Yes. Well, just not in Sydney itself, but just outside, we've had snow. So I think you've taken all our heat. We'd like some of it back, thank you.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (17:27.898)
Yeah, yeah, you gotta wait though.

Ian Harris (17:31.958)
Ha

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (17:33.72)
All right, okay, thank you. All right, so before I let you go, I want to ask you to talk to an aspiring podcaster because unfortunately we still have podcasters who are struggling. They're struggling to make their message heard, struggling to even do this business of podcasting. And they're those who are scared to get into it. So talk to an

podcast about how exciting time is and how AI can help them to better, you know, push themselves out there.

Ian Harris (18:14.122)
I think that's my favorite topic. So podcasting is so much fun. It is so much fun being able to have that sense that you are communicating with people that think the same way as you out there somewhere is a wonderful thought that you are connected with people that care about the same things as you do, whatever it is. And everyone's got their favorite topic that they want to be able to talk about. So I think anyone that was thinking about podcasting, you can get some basic equipment and you can start recording.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (18:31.453)
Yes.

Ian Harris (18:40.78)
and you can start editing using simple applications. There's lots of YouTube videos on how to do that. And you can get going really easily. It's not too hard. The challenge with podcasting where you really want to, if you really want to be in it, the challenge is to get that relentlessness of getting those episodes out. And what we found is that the vast majority of people that start a podcast never get past episode 12. 12 seems to be the magic number. So if you can push past 12 episodes,

then you're doing vastly better than the majority of podcasts out there. And the funny thing is that that relentlessness of getting episodes out gets you into a rhythm of it. It makes you feel like it's part of your life, part of your kind of structure of what you do. And once you kind of push past those 12 episodes, it becomes much easier. So if you can get past that hump of 12, then you kind of make it into a better routine. And then you start to find that people find your podcast over time. There's something about that relentlessness.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (19:21.608)
Yes.

Ian Harris (19:37.528)
and about that continuity of thought of getting that content out. That seems to mean that you find more people over time. I know everyone thinks they have a great idea and then the second episode they don't know why they don't have a million listeners. It takes time. It really takes time. So, you know, we've had podcasts that have taken a year or more of kind of persistent delivery that suddenly find this uptick of audience somehow.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (19:40.84)
Mm

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (19:45.456)
Yeah.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (19:50.448)
Ha ha ha.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (19:54.501)
Yeah.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (20:04.773)
Yes.

Ian Harris (20:06.228)
If it's something you care about and you have more than zero listeners, someone cares about what you're putting out. Someone is listening to it. Someone out there is hearing what you have to say. I think it's really exciting and I would encourage anyone that wants to get into podcasting to have a crack and to keep going because the relentlessness is what really matters.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (20:14.746)
Yes.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (20:24.941)
Yes, awesome. Thank you. Thank you, Ian Harris, for coming and talking to us on Tools of the Podcast Trade. I appreciate you.

Ian Harris (20:32.182)
Pleasure, wonderful to be here and thanks for having me on. I've had a lovely time, thank