My Take on Podcast AI + A Review of Tools I've Tried [Ep. 103]

 
 

Click play to hear my take on Podcast AI:

 
 

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Here’s what to expect from this episode:

AI has been around for a long time in all different kinds of forms. But it has gotten a LOT more popular this year. And though it is not a magic pill, as podcasting still requires time and strategy to get the most out of it, you can definitely use podcast AI to your advantage. And that's exactly what I'm sharing today.

In this episode, you'll hear my thoughts on AI, a review of the tools I've tried, their pros and cons, and how you can utilize each one to help you plan your podcast and save time.

Tune in to hear how to generate good podcast transcripts with Otter.ai, Descript's best (and worst) aspects, using non-podcast-specific AI like ChatGPT, and more!

And don't worry; I've got you covered with all the pricing* info too! (*At time of recording.)

TOPICS COVERED:

  • Why AI for podcasts is not a magic pill

  • Using Otter.ai to generate podcast transcripts

  • The pros and cons of Descript

  • How you could use ChatGPT for podcast planning

  • Comparing Podsqueeze, Castmagic, and more!

  • Plus, a live demo using ClickUp AI

Resources mentioned:

favorite podcast resources:

Connect with Sara:

Related episodes:

  • Sara Whittaker 0:01

    Your Podcast is a powerful tool that serves your audience and your business. But how do you manage it all bring in new listeners, and convert those listeners into customers. That's what this show is all about. Welcome to podcasting for educators. I'm Sara Whitaker, classroom teacher turn podcast manager. And I'm here to help you get the most out of your show, all while making an impact on other educators. Podcast AI, this is a topic that I have been purposely waiting to cover on this show. AI has been around for a long time in all kinds of different forms. But I feel like it really exploded at the beginning of 2023. And I've been a little bit cautious about it and didn't want to share my opinion until I was more clear on exactly what my opinion was. And to be honest, I'm still not 100% sure on how I feel about at all. There's a lot of questions and concerns about AI in general, is that copywriting someone else's content? Will it take over our jobs? Will it work against us when it comes to SEO? And I'm not really going to get into the answers of all of those questions in this episode. I've done my research on these, and I'm finding very mixed things. The point of this episode is really to focus on podcast AI specifically, there's one thing I know to be true, AI definitely isn't going anywhere. And there's definitely ways that it can help you save time, save mental energy, and enhance things that you're already doing with your podcast. There's lots of AI tools out there created specifically for podcasters. And the great thing about those tools is that they are using your content, and providing you with deliverables based on that content. Over the past few months, I've tried lots of these different AI tools for podcasters. So that I could really compare them and be able to give you some recommendations and just share a little bit about what each of these tools can do. But before I get into those, I just want to say I think everyone is always looking for a magic pill to do everything for them. And when AI really exploded, I know that that's what a lot of people saw. But that doesn't exist no matter how many podcasts, AI tools you use, podcasting is still going to take you time, and it's still going to require you to be strategic to get the most out of it. And that's just not something that you can get from let's say chat, GBT. I think the best way to view podcast AI is to really figure out how it can help you clarify your ideas, get you started on an episode, save you some time during post production, and help you simplify how you're repurposing your episodes. So here are some podcast specific AI tools that I've used and how I've used them and what's included pricing, things like that. I'm going to start with a program that I'm considering, like basic ai ai because I've been using this for a couple of years now. And it might not be like what you really think of when you think about podcasts AI. And that is otter.ai You may have heard me talk about this. I talked about it several times on this podcast. I've been using this for years now to transcribe our clients episodes. And it's one of my very favorite tools it's 1,000% worth paying for. Because listen, I don't know if you have ever manually transcribed anything in your life. But I have one of the first things I tried when I was exploring ways to make money online was transcribing I am a really fast typer. But it took me hours to do this for literal pennies, you make absolutely nothing. If you're going to have a transcript for your episodes, do not do it manually use AI, you're still going to need to clean it up, edit things make line breaks. If it's a guest episode, you can name the speaker's so that that shows up in the transcript. It won't be perfect or sometimes even readable depending on which transcription program you use, unless you do take that time to clean it up. But it's still going to be so much faster than manually typing out every single word. Transcripts are really best practice for making your content more accessible. But they're also great for helping you write shownotes and quickly pulling out quotes for social media. So on otter.ai you upload the audio you just drag and drop your audio into there. Within a couple of minutes it transcribes the episode. And then what I love about it is you can like when you're looking at the transcript, you can push play and it will read the audio back to you. As you edit the transcript. You can even highlight things or So you could also use the transcript to write to help you write show notes. And you can kind of highlight things as you go. And then when you export the transcript, you can copy and paste it onto your show notes page, you can export it as a doc or as a PDF. And you can choose to have timestamps automatically included on your transcript to a few of the other tools that I mentioning. After this, they include transcripts. But I actually, even when I am using other programs, I still use otter for my transcripts, because I just find them to be the most accurate, and I just really love how it's set up, and how you can go about editing the transcript. As far as price goes, their current pricing is $99 for 1200 monthly minutes, and that's $99 for the entire year. There is a free version, but it is limited, I want to say that you can upload maybe three audio files a month for free. So depending on how many episodes you have, you might be able to get away with the free version. Next up is D script. Now, I don't personally use this script, but I have tried it out a bit in the past, people go absolutely crazy over it. It does a lot of really cool things. But there is one big gap for me. And I'll tell you what that is in a minute. But on their website, D script describes itself as the only tool you need to write, record, transcribe, edit, collaborate and share your videos and podcasts. Some of their features include actually recording audio, and video editing. And the really unique thing with D script is that it transcribes your audio. So when you're recording, or when you drop your audio in there, you can actually it will transcribe that audio. And then you can actually edit the audio from the transcript, meaning that you can look at the transcript and highlight certain words and delete them. And then they will delete in the audio. Pretty cool. You can also request it to remove filler words with the click of a button. And I think that this is what's one of the most appealing features to a lot of people. But if you just automatically delete filler words in descript, and there's arms, that might be attached to sentences, you know, sometimes people are talking and they might say, so.

    Sara Whittaker 7:37

    Like, they're kind of thinking that's easily cut out. And that's fine. But a lot of times people say, um, as they're in the middle of a sentence, and it's not so isolated, for example. So yesterday, I um, went to the store and I bought an apple. So it's kind of attached to the sentence, there's no transition. And so when that automatically gets deleted in the script, it's really abrupt, and it sounds super choppy. So some other podcasts managers that I know, they'll do a first round of editing and descript. And then they'll take that audio file and put it in Audacity, and do another run through so that they can smooth out all of those choppy transitions. To me, I would just rather edit and Audacity from the get go. But everybody has their own routines. And I know that a lot of people absolutely love this script. And it does save them a lot of time. So for sure it's worth checking out. You can also have it automatically remove any long silences in your episodes. You can pull clips, create audiograms, like I said earlier, edit videos that you can use for social media or YouTube, things like that. Lots and lots of features. If you go to their website, they have a really it's a pretty funny tutorial video that just tells you a little bit more about the program. Definitely worth checking out. Also, if you are in the prep school, a training got added in May. That was done by Kristin mastic. Thank you so much, Kristen. And Kristen uses D script. I know a few other people in the prep school use D script and she shared her screen and actually showed you all around the script and like how all of the features work and how she uses it. And I believe that she said she is on the free plan of D script. So if you're really trying to have a program where you can do everything in one place, which is obviously super ideal. And you're in the prep school, definitely go and check out that training. Alright, next up is the AI tool that we're probably all most familiar with. And that is chat GPT. Now this isn't a podcast specific AI tool, but there's definitely lots of things that you can use it for with your podcast. For example, you can give it a topic and ask it to outline your episode. I've tried this before. Didn't really love it. I feel like it takes a lot to be anywhere near my voice and the tone that I want my my episodes to have. You can also have it help you title your episodes. This is definitely what I have used chat GPT the most for. So I might say give me 10 podcast episode title suggestions for this topic, and then I would list out the topic of that episode. If you've never used chat GBT are really is like a little chat box and you can chat back and forth with it, ask it to tweak things, ask it to put things in a different tone, ask it for more suggestions, tell it things that you don't like about what it just gave you so they can give you some new suggestions. There's lots of different things that you can do if you don't love the results that they first give you. The more that I've used this for title suggestions, the more that I'm beginning to see the same kinds of patterns over and over again, which I don't love. But this is also something that I could definitely improve on by giving it better prompts. And that's something that I'm still learning about. You could ask Chad JBT to write a CTA for you, you can paste your actual transcript for your episode into chat GPT and ask it to write you a social media post for that episode, or help you write a newsletter for that episode. Definitely take some playing around with but lots and lots of potential in terms of helping you either get started with your episode or helping you repurpose it. Okay, the next tool is one that is fairly new, and that is called pod squeeze. Now, this is one that I've been trying out. And there's definitely a lot of things that I love about it. And definitely still a lot of room for improvement. But I could say that about any of these tools. And with POD squeeze this is, as you can guess by its name, specifically for podcasts. So what you do is you upload your audio, so I use it after I have done an episode, you just drop your audio in takes just a couple minutes, and it will then spit out a bunch of these deliverables. It gives you a full transcript. It's okay, I still think otter is better. But it is pretty good compared to some of these other programs. So basically, you're looking at the screen. And there's all these different boxes of deliverables, and you click on it and it expands and gives you more text, but one of the things it gives you is what they call shownotes. This is probably the thing I like the least it's not great. It's very short. It's usually like one paragraph. And it's just not good. I would never ever just copy and paste that and use that for shownotes. It gives you timestamps with main talking points from the episode, this is my favorite feature that it gives. And this is something that I have used to help me write show notes. Now, as far as my workflow for shownotes, I do not like to write show notes while I edit. I listened to the episode separately, to write show notes to make sure that I can really put my focus on show notes. And so these timestamps with talking points are really helpful for putting the talking points in your show notes. Again, they're not perfect, but sometimes there have been ways that they've worded things that I've really loved. And it really helps you just kind of like pull out some of the main ideas of the episode. They also give you a ton of tweets if you're a Twitter person. And I will say the tweets are pretty good. They're pretty engaging, they use emojis and things like that. I don't use Twitter, so I don't really use them. Sometimes I'll use that if I'm looking to write an Instagram caption for one of my episodes, I'll pull something from the tweet because they are kind of engaging, sometimes kind of funny. They also give you several different episode title suggestions. They give you links and resources that you mentioned in the episode, which is pretty cool. Not super accurate from my experience. So take it with a grain of salt. They give you what's called a short post, which could be used for socials, or for a blog post, I guess. Sometimes these are good. They have things that you can pull from sometimes, again, they're not so great. They have a newsletter. They have keywords, they pull some quotes, they usually give a few quotes. There's typically in my experience, at least one pretty good one. They're definitely not all great. And then I will say for each of those deliverables, you can what they call tune the results of these things. So if you pull up the newsletter that they gave you, and you're not loving it, which I usually don't. You can say just like you would do in chat, GBT, you could say something like, can you please make this a little funnier? Or can you take out this part, so you can fine tune things. As far as the price for pod squeeze, it is free for up to 55, zero minutes of podcast time. And then it's $15 a month for 160 minutes of audio, and then it goes up from there. We have several clients. And what I love about pod squeeze is they had an option for podcasts managers, which I want to say was like $49 a month, and it included a pretty good chunk of minutes. So if I were to use this long term, I do feel like the pricing is fair. But I have tried it out. And at this time, I am not going to continue using them. We'll see it might change in the future. Okay, next up is something that I have tried more recently, and that is called Magic cast. And with magic has similar to pod squeeze, you drop your audio in, and within a couple of minutes, it gives you a transcript. Don't love the transcripts. Again, I'm just always going to use otter.ai for transcripts. And then it gives you a bunch of AI content. And it includes titles for your episodes, key words, and introduction, which I thought was interesting, because you're already putting your audio in there. So I don't really see a need for this because you know, you've already recorded the intro. I guess this could be good for, like if you do a guest interview if you wanted to put your audio in ahead of time, and then it could spit out an intro for you to record for the episode. But to me, that just seems like more work. It gives you a timestamped overview. It gives you questions and answers. I thought that this is a really cool feature. So it pulls a bunch of questions from the episode and then ways that you've answered them in that episode. And what I've discovered is this is a really cool feature for creating a carousel for your episodes. So you could take either a couple of those questions or just one of those questions and answers and turn it into a carousel for that episode. You could also use it for show notes. If you do long form, show notes on your website. You could use those questions as different headings in your show notes. Or you could just have a section in your show notes that says like these are some questions that are answered in this episode, lots of different ways that you could utilize that. It also gives you key topics and bullet points slash talking points for each topic. This is also great for social media and for repurposing, they aren't time stamped. That is the one thing I really did like about pod squeeze is that they timestamp to those things. They also give you this one's pretty cool. They give you a real script like for Instagram reels. So they pull out something from the episode that you could create a real about and they write a script for you. And like I said, I've just started playing around with this tool. But the one that I've used it for is actually really good. So I thought that that was a really neat feature. It gives you a LinkedIn post. If you use LinkedIn. It gives you multiple options for a newsletter. And then it also gives you tweets. And then the really cool feature is there's another tab that you can click on that called Magic chat. And this is kind of like chat GBT. That's episode specific. So you can ask it to do things. And what it says in this section is it says using the prompts below, you can ask anything you want about the episode. I know all the important concepts of this episode, you can think of me like your personal assistant, use me to generate new types of content or as a source for new ideas. For example, you can ask it to write a thank you note for the guest. Write a summary about the episode in Spanish. Write a conversational Instagram post about the episode. Lots of cool, cool things that you can do with that. As far as the price goes. I actually just got this on App Sumo. This was my first time using App Sumo. I know some people live and die by this website. It's pretty cool. And on App Sumo, I don't know. Like I said, I don't really know anything about App Sumo. So I don't know if this is like a limited time offer. But at the time of this recording, you can buy lifetime access to cast magic. I think I call it magic cast before the name is cast magic. But on AppSumo you can buy lifetime access for either plan one which is $39 for two episodes a month lifetime though, so you're paying $39 for lifetime I plan to $78 for five episodes per month. And then plan three, which is the one I got. It's $117, for 10 episodes a month, for lifetime. So you pay $117, and you have lifetime access for 10 episodes a month, in my opinion, super worth it. But even if this if you're listening to this, and that deal is no longer valid, and I will leave a link to that so that you can check it out. But if for some reason that's no longer there, their pricing on their website was pretty reasonable as well. And you can't and they give you a coupon code when you go to sign up. So definitely worth checking out at this time. Again, this could totally change. But at this time, Cast Magic is the one that I'm most interested to explore more and try out some more. Some other podcasts AI tools, our cap show, which is I have tried it, it includes a lot of really cool things. But it is pricey. To get all of the good features, it's $99 a month, or 950 a year. In my opinion, it's just it's too pricey when you have all these other options. There's also swell AI, which I've heard great things about AI, I've tried it once. And I wasn't so impressed that I would pay more for it than I would pay for something else. And that's $29 a month for five uploads per month. And then they have other plans that go up from there. clickup also just added AI. So I use clickup for project management. I know some of you do as well, I've just started playing around with it. So I can't report too much yet. But I'm writing this outline for this episode within a doc inside of clickup. And when you're doing that you can when you're writing anything inside of a click up doc, you can highlight any of your text and choose all kinds of like different AI things to do with it. Like, let me try.

    Sara Whittaker 22:00

    Like you can it says improve writing, fix spelling and grammar, make it longer make it shorter, simplify my writing, summarize this. So you could like put a transcript in and ask it to summarize your transcript. So lots of different things that are pretty cool. Let's I thought it'd be fun to give this a try. I'm going to share like a little blurb with you. And then I'm going to have clickup improve it is what they call it. And we'll see how it goes. So here's my blurb. I hope you enjoyed this episode about podcast AI and found a tool or two that you might want to try out. I really encourage you to experiment and see what's going to work best with your workflow. If you try out anything that I mentioned today, send me a message and tell me about it. Okay, so that's what I wrote. Then I took that, and I told clickup AI to improve it. This is what I said, I trust you relished this podcast episode on AI and discovered a couple of tools that piqued your interest, I urge you to explore and determine which ones will optimize your workflow. If you experiment with any of the tools I discussed today, kindly drop me a message and share your experience. Those are words that I just wanted, say so I'm not. I could ask it to tweak things. But I'd rather just go with what I originally said. And this is what I see. A lot of the times with AI in a lot of cases, I just don't feel like aI saves me the time that I hope it will. Sometimes I would rather just write the shownotes or write the social media post, or pull out the talking points from an episode myself. But that has just been my experience. There's definitely been times that I am grateful that I have these tools. And I do think that they're just going to continue over time. But as I said earlier, it's definitely not a magic pill for any of us. As we have all probably heard people say, yes, we need to learn to embrace AI because it isn't going anywhere. But I also say embrace with caution, don't lose your creativity or your voice. Don't become too reliant on it that you aren't using your brain anymore. For a little while there. When I was really playing around with chat GBT when it first came out, I would go straight there way too often for things and I had to give myself a little slap and stop doing that because you don't need it for everything. And you don't want to lose that unique voice that you have and your creativity. I hope this was helpful for you and that you enjoyed hearing about all of these different podcasts AI tools. I'm really excited to hear if you're going to try any of these out or if you already use some of these tools. Definitely send me a message on Instagram at podcasting for educators and let me know what your favorites are. I'll see you next week. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode to keep this conversation going connect with me on Instagram at podcasting for educators. I'm always looking for an excuse to talk about podcasting. If you're looking for support and launching, managing or growing your podcast, check out my online course the podcasting for educators prep school at podcasting for educators.com/prep school. I'll see you here next time.

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Podcasting for Educators is the podcast for TpT authors and other online educators. It's a show that will help you get your podcast in front of those who need it most - teachers, counselors, literacy specialists, SLPs, parents, and more! Each week, Sara Whittaker and her guests will share top tips and actionable strategies that you will need in order to launch, manage, and grow your podcast. You’ll learn how to leverage your show to build long-lasting relationships with your audience and promote your TpT resources, courses, and memberships, all while providing valuable and accessible content!

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Sara Whittaker