Three Ways AI Can Level Up Your Podcast Workflow

We break down a listener question about AI and show a simple way to start using it without feeling overwhelmed. You’ll learn how AI can act as three helpful roles for your podcast—saving you time, improving decision-making, and helping you stay true to your unique voice.

Resource Mentioned: Turn AI Into Your Personal Podcast Analyst!

If you have questions about using AI for your podcast, reach out to us on the Podcaster Success team by emailing support@buzzsprout.com 

Keep podcasting!

Transcript

Welcome And Listener Question

Cara Pacetti 0:00

Welcome to Podcasting Q&A, brought to you by the people at Buzzsprout. I'm your host, Cara Pacetti, and I'm bringing you the best tips and strategies to keep you podcasting with confidence. Before we answer today's question, make sure to click the Send Us fan mail link in the show notes and send us your questions. Your question could inspire our next Podcasting Q&A episode. In this episode, we are answering a listener's question about using AI for their podcast. Today's question says, I've heard a lot of hype around using AI for my podcast, but I'm not sure I even know where to start. How can AI help me produce my podcast? Okay, first, I'd like to be fully transparent for a moment. AI originally really intimidated me. I was nervous to use it until I understood a little more about it and how it can really help me streamline my workflow. Now I use it all the time, and it's a tool that I want to share with you. So do me a favor, shake off any nerves you have around using AI and hear me out. For today's episode, I want us to think about AI as playing three different roles for your podcast.

Use AI as a research assistant

Cara Pacetti 1:15

First, you can use AI as a research assistant. You can also use AI as a podcast analyst. And third, we can use AI as our very own co-host. If you're launching a new podcast or you're even trying to come up with ideas for new episodes for your existing podcast, it's nice to bounce ideas off of somebody. Sometimes you can even bounce ideas off of AI. So you can use AI to help you research and brainstorm exactly what you want your podcast to be about. If you're fairly new to AI, there are things out there called an AI chatbot. And the AI chatbot is really easy to use. There's different versions of them. The one that I'm most familiar with is ChatGPT, but you would use Chat GPT to type in just a couple of sentences about what your podcast is going to be about. Really just kind of braindump what you are thinking. And AI can analyze that information that you've added. And it has a big library of resources that it can pull from. And so AI can suggest things like what format would be the best fit for this podcast that you are describing. It can also spit back some ideas for you. So for the title and the descriptions and episode topic ideas, it will provide a list of options that you can customize. You can even describe exactly what you want your podcast artwork to look like and ask AI to create an image. It's up to you whether you want to use the image created by AI. But if you're using a graphic designer or you are designing an image on your own, this is a helpful way just to kind of get an idea. It gives you the image and you can decide how you want to make it custom to your podcast. One of the ways that I like to use AI is I'll admit it, I don't like hearing the same call to action for every episode. And so for a podcast like mine, podcasting QA, we have a call to action that I include with every episode because I love to hear your questions and I want to make sure that I'm always asking for them, but I don't want to ask in the same way every week. So sometimes I will prompt AI and say, hey, how can I ask this same question in a creative way? And this will give me different ways of asking for you to send me in questions as my listeners. And so try that out. If you have an existing podcast and there's something that you're asking from your listeners, switch it up. Maybe you can ask it in a different way that really gets their attention and will inspire them to reach out to you or to connect with you or follow through with the call to action that you're saying in your episodes. Moving on from the conceptualization of your podcast, you can even ask AI to help you with the technical aspects of podcasting. So this includes ways of setting up your recording studio, maybe how to make edits using a certain editing software, and how to use an audio interface. This is just scratching the surface of the technical questions that you can ask AI. But like I said, there's a giant library of resources that it's pulling from. And so it might be able to give you quick, reliable answers instead of you having to comb the internet and try to find those resources on your own. As you can already tell, AI is just here to help. So that's some of the ways that AI can be used as a research assistant or a brainstorming partner for your podcast.

Use AI as a podcast analyst

Cara Pacetti 4:37

Next, I want to share how AI can be used as a podcast analyst. So whether your podcast is new or you have an extensive back catalog of episodes, it helps to have a resource that can ingest your content, analyze it, and provide feedback quickly. AI can identify patterns, information gaps, and possible ways to improve your podcast. And while this would take a lot of brain power for both you and me, this is something that AI can do super fast and accurately. To have AI analyze your content, you will need to input that content that you want reviewed. So basically, you need to copy important details from your episodes, like titles, descriptions, episode duration, published dates, and even download totals. And you can enter all of that information into the AI chats I was talking about earlier. When you do this, you will also need to provide some parameters so that AI can comb through the data that you provided and make some of those determinations. For example, if you're asking what your most popular episodes are, you will need to enter a prompt into AI to let it know that the age of the episodes has to be taken into consideration. Older episodes have the luxury of accumulating more downloads since they've been available to your listeners longer. So AI can account for that in determining which episodes are the most popular. While this may sound a little overwhelming, once you get the hang of it, you'll find that using AI in this way can really help you level up your podcast. Our team walks through step-by-step instructions on how to do this in an episode of Buzzcast. I'm going to link that in the show notes below. I recommend listening to that episode for a better explanation of what's going on. And then from there, give it a try with your podcast. Reach out to us using FanMail to let me know how it goes. Once you've created the data set for your show by entering all of that information into a chat, AI can use it to match the existing tone of your podcast. So when you've outlined your script on your own, you can copy and paste and submit it to AI for adjustments. And what AI can do is pull that data that you submitted and match the overall tone of your podcast. So the suggestions that you're getting from AI tend to match up with other content that you've already released. Now, I want to let you know the suggestions that AI provides are always up to your discretion. So take them or leave them. Never allow AI to rob you of your voice in your podcast. If after all of this, AI still sounds intimidating, first of all, I understand. And second, I have a great option for you. If

Use AI as a podcast cohost

Cara Pacetti 7:18

you're hosted here on Buzzsprout, our team has designed a feature that will use the power of AI, but we've made it super simple for you to use. Co-host AI uses the power of AI to take the content you've recorded and create written content for your episodes. So this is where AI comes in as your co-host to help you with the automation of your podcast. We built this feature into BuzzSprout to simplify and streamline your upload process. We use AI to help give you options for those time-consuming details so you can just focus more on your episode's content. When you upload your episode into BuzzSprout with co-host AI enabled, we will start generating content as soon as your episode is processing. We generate episode titles, descriptions, chapter markers, social media posts, and a full and editable transcript. One of the best parts is that it's pulling directly from your episode audio. So the content is based on what you actually said in the episode. The content co-host AI creates does not have to be used verbatim. Everything can be edited, and we make it really easy to make changes inside of your BuzzSprout account. I encourage you to review and personalize any content the AI gives you before publishing it and making it your own. Since Co-Host AI has been designed to reduce some of the overwhelming tasks that come with podcasting, you can spend less time on the busy work and more time actually getting creative with your content. I personally use Co-Host AI for Podcasting Q&A, and it really helps, especially if I'm in kind of a brain fog or I'm just not feeling super creative. It gets me started. So I can review the episode description that it provides. And then from there, I just take it and make it my own, but it at least takes on the information that I've already recorded and kind of spits it back to me in a way that I can make adjustments to and make it my own. If you have questions about using AI for your podcast, please reach out to us on the podcaster success team. You can reach us by emailing support at buzzsprout.com. Be sure to join us every Monday to kickstart your week. Thank you so much for listening. And as always, keep podcasting.