Podcast Pontifications

Yesterday, Brian McCullough used Overdub to generate the last half of the Techmeme Ride Home episode for that day. It was an excellent side-by-side (or first-then-second) comparison of Brian’s actual voice and the Overdub recreated voice. It was eerily good.

But it wasn’t perfect. For advancements in this area, perfection is approached on an asymptotic curve, and the uncanny valley is quite deep. 

But it’s good enough for podcasters to make use of today without taking us humans out of the equation. Here’s how:

A New Podcast Ad Format - Beyond host-read, pre-produced, and producer-read ads, any podcast could effectively have a custom voice-over “person” ready to kick out ads at any time.

Customized Canned Content - Having “canned” intros and outros save time during the production process. But there’s a tradeoff for the convenience: they can’t be customized. Uness your voice talent is made of silicon, that is. Tweak the text a bit, feed it to the system, and you have episode-by-episode customizations to your intro, your outro, and any relevant parts in between. Best of all; they sound human. 

Localizing Podcast Episodes - How many more people could your podcast reach if it was available in a different language? So far, it’s taken a lot of money and time to localize podcast content. But if your voice-talent pool is silicon-based, you can spend all of your time getting the localized script perfect in that language, and leave it to the system to generate the audio.

Non-Critical Narrative Bits - Sometimes, a solo-effort narrative episode would be made better if there were other voices were adding color to portions of the episode that otherwise sound “flat”. Can you give those bits to the AI to have a convincingly-human voice on those instead of yours? 

Giving Voice To NPCs In Podcast Fiction - At the risk of being accused of taking money out of the mouths of hard-working voice actors, some of small, single-line parts in a podcast fiction story could be synthesized on smaller productions that lack the budget to pay for a narrator on every single part. 

I have no plans of turning Podcast Pontifications over to an android anytime soon. I’d lose a big part of my daily therapy if I did that! Nor do I think you should worry (or dream) about this tech getting so good that your own voice is no longer required. But if you decide to use an AI as your co-host, I totally want to listen.

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Read the full article and share with a friend: https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/do-androids-dream-of-being-on-your-podcast

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Podcast Pontifications is published by Evo Terra four times a week and is designed to make podcasting better, not just easier.

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Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th. Abortion is a basic healthcare need for the millions of people who can become pregnant. Everyone should have the freedom to decide what’s best for themselves and their families, including when it comes to ending a pregnancy. This decision has dire consequences for individual health and safety, and could have harsh repercussions for other landmark decisions. Restricting access to comprehensive reproductive care, including abortion, threatens the health and independence of all Americans. Even if you live in a state where abortion rights are upheld, access to safe medical procedures shouldn’t be determined by location, and it shouldn't be the privilege of a small few. You can help by donating to local abortion funds. To find out where to donate for each state, visit donations4abortion.com. If you or someone you know needs help, or if you want to get more involved, here are 5 resources: 1. ShoutYourAbortion.com is a campaign to normalize abortion. 2. DontBanEquality.com is a campaign for companies to take a stand against abortion restrictions. 3. Abortion.cafe has information about where to find clinics. 4. PlanCPills.org provides early at-home abortion pills that you can keep in your medicine cabinet. 5. Choice.CRD.co has a collection of these resources and more. We encourage you to speak up! And spread the word.

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy
Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy
Podsights - https://podsights.com/privacy