Welcome to Portland. Portland is sponsored by Buzzsprout podcast hosting and a whole lot more there at buzzsprout.com. It's Thursday, December the 10th, 2020. I'm James Cridland, the editor of podnews here in Australia.
And I'm Sam Sethi, the editor of Sam Talks Technology here in the UK. I am Sam Liang from Otter.ai, automatic meeting assistant for all your meetings and l'll be on later to talk about Otter live notes for virtual meetings.
He will. Portland is a weekly podcast where Sam and I delve deeper into the week's most important news, which I cover daily at podnews.net.
So here's, what's coming up on this week's podcast. James seems lost, or at least he's trying to find his location, IAB version 2.1 guidelines and money from audible. Now that sounds good. And a lot more now, James, you seem lost this week. you've been talking about location a lot. Tell us more. What's this location stuff you've been working on?
Yes, podcast index, is, doing a bunch of really good work. So that's Dave Jones and Adam Curry, They're working on an open podcast index. but they're also working. what they call podcasting 2.0, it's lots of new tags, to really help podcasting increase and improve. And one of those tags, that has been talked about for a long time is the idea of location.
to say where a podcast is about, if you're doing a podcast about the Eiffel tower, wouldn't it be really good if there was a programmatic way to search for that? So I was, writing the spec for the podcast location, tag, earlier on in the week, which has been quite interesting. It's been a little bit stuck over the last six weeks because I think it's just been really confusing.
and there's lots of things that you can do with a location tag in podcasting, but I think we're pretty well there now, which is really good news.
When I looked at what you were writing, you were struggling with what spec to use. What did you end up with?
So we've ended up with a couple of different things. it turns out that location is really complicated. the first thing is, that there's two types of location. One type of location is a point on the planet earth, which you would normally talk about with a latitude and longitude. There's a thing called a geo URI, which is an RFC, which allows you to also say how high it is off the ground and various other things.
But that's a really good way of just pointing to a place on planet earth and saying this podcast is about that. And that's great. That means that you can appear on a map. But it doesn't necessarily convey anything about that particular place. So then there's another part of that, which is, more details about the actual place that you, are linking to.
and in this particular case, there's a bunch of different, people, Google has a Google maps, places ID, there's geo names.org has a, quite a nice, API as well, but there's also open street maps, which has a bunch of data. And some of that data is, an ID for a country. So the United States of America has a particular way that you would talk about that. And that is unambiguously the United States of America. But then you can then go down to the state of Washington.
You can then go down to, the city of Seattle. You can look at the space needle. If you want. You can even look at a walkway next to the space needle. That's how detailed it can actually get. And it's got all of the data around that as well. So you could end up, at a position in the future when lots of people are using the podcast location tag of being able to say, I would like to listen to all podcasts about train stations in Germany. and it would be able to find that information, out of that.
really rich what you can do with it. but it's also been really interesting, just, working out the use cases, working out what you can actually link to and what people actually want out of a location tag. And there's the other side, of course, which is, quite a lot of people want to talk about where a podcast is from. is that a podcast location tag?
certainly we started off by wanting to include that in the location tag as well, but I think we realized relatively early on that, location of where a podcast is from. Isn't actually a location of a podcast. It's a location of the people in the podcast. this might have a location, of the South of England and of Queensland. and that's fine, actually. Yes, that would confuse people an awful lot. But actually that's fine.
but what, that's not really talking about the podcast, it's just talking about where you're sitting right now, where I'm sitting right now. really the location goes with the people, and there is a separate tab called podcast people, which has also being worked on, which actually links already to all of that location information as well. that's where that is going, which makes the podcast location tag much easier because it's just a location tag talking about what the podcast.
Is about, and that's a great step forward. I
wonder if we can sneak an Easter egg in where we put location podland, and we just decide where on planet earth podland is
that's even in the spec as well. So if you are doing a podcast that is about Hogwarts, for example, then yes, you can say it's about Hogwarts. What you can't do is you can't add a G O U R I a. You can't make up a lat long cause then it's wrong. and you can't link to an open street map ID because obviously there isn't one.
but you can still actually say, yes, it's about Hogwarts and that again all joking aside that's really helpful for fiction podcasts There are lots of those about it's been a really interesting thing being on the podcast index Github talking about that particular spec trying to get everything as clear as possible and it's being quite fun and rewarding to work on Let's see if anybody actually uses it which will be the next step The
interesting thing is phase one of the namespace change closed on the 15th of November And That included podcasts locking transcriptions funding chapters and soundbites And I'm glad to say our sponsor Buzzsprout has implemented all of phase while along with fireside and out If you want to find out which companies or hosts implemented phase one already You can go to podcast index.org forward slash apps and it will give you a complete listing of everyone Who's actually supported phase one and phase
two will be closing on the 31st of January and location is part of that So if you feel like you want to Participate in any of this Where can they go again James
podcastindex.org the closing date for submissions for the next round of tags is the end of January things being looked at are things like the people tag that I was talking about the location tag a way of being able to name seasons which is important particularly if you're a fiction podcast Things around social media links I'm hoping also to get the ID tag through and the ID tag is very dull and very tedious but it's just a way of being able to say this podcast is
available here on Apple podcasts here on Spotify here on Amazon music and so on and so forth So that would be a really useful one And hopefully we can get that pushed into phase two as well Brilliant
And just to preempt next week show we will be having Adam and Dave from podcast index as our guests we
will and they were listening to last week which was very exciting At least Dave was so it should be fun to have him on He's probably sitting there with his head in his hands going what are they talking about That's not exactly what's going on at all but he can
correct us next week
He can as well And one of the things that Adam and Dave feel very strongly around is monetization value for value as they call it of a way of earning revenue from your podcasts And there's a bunch of specs there which I don't fully understand So it'd be good to talk to them about that too
Now Mehta nom has Sam Hep land Do you get that Jamie
Nice I was impressed at your Punjabi
My parents wouldn't be let me put it that way for that station was way off but that said you had a story this week about a company called pod LP Tell me more
So pod LP is a podcast which isn't a iOS podcast app Doesn't run an iPhone nor does it run on Android phones It runs on a different type of phone called Chi OS and Chi OS Particularly of use in developing countries places yes like India but in other places as well and what Pod LP has done is they've partnered with another company called rephonic and they are linking to top podcasts in those people's local languages In the app So if you speak yes English and Spanish and
French of course but also if you speak behalf or you speak Afrikaans or you speak Turkish or Vietnamese you'll find the most popular podcasts in those particular languages as well in there which is a really important thing I think if it's the first time you've ever seen a podcast app The last thing that you arguably want is to see Joe Rogan not these available as a podcast anymore or to see the New York times daily if the only language you speak is Swahili so this is a great step forward
Two great shows on Netflix that I've watched recently One is the bridge which was in Swedish with subtitles and Corpus Christi which was a Polish film which is amazing by the way if you haven't seen it highly recommend it Now I wouldn't be able to watch out of those because of the language barrier but because of translation and captioning I could Again when I look at the fact that the world's biggest country in terms of podcasting in terms of adoption and usage is Korea I wonder how many great
podcasts that come out of there that we just bypass because literally it's not designed for us but actually the content within it would be very useful
it is interesting seeing what's going on in different countries Korea the the podcast charts appear to be full of reheated radio shows which is great and fine And that's certainly a valid use of podcasting But when you look at some of the stuff that Wondery has been doing for example I think they've translated Dr Death now into eight different languages and that is a fascinating opportunity to take IP that Wondery own to take some great sound production and everything
else And to remake that into a different language that makes a bunch of sense There's also a number of other people who are either translating podcasts or taking the same messages from a podcast and putting that into a different language I think we have to be Careful with culture he says a British person We were the worst people for that in history but anyway that's an important thing when it comes to translating shows into a different language So it's really
interesting to see what's going on there
I won't labor the point but one of the things that I guess the internet has been for me personally batter is actually leveling out culture Because if you look at music you can go anywhere around the world and you look at the charts and it's actually very similar whether it's English speaking or not And I wonder whether we will lose some of the value of localized podcasting If we a morphism through language
I think we need to be careful in terms of culture weirdly the the music industry as I understand it is actually getting more localized now and part of the reason for that is the availability of streaming services like geo sovereign and Ghana in India or their equivalents in many other countries so maybe actually it's breathing a little bit more life into individual music from individual Countries a couple of months ago I was talking with a radio station that was based in Lagos
in Nigeria and I spent some time listening to it I didn't recognize any of the music and that's not just because I'm old and I touch although that's probably got some something to do with that It's also because it was all local stuff the SAPC in South Africa they have rules around only playing South African music on their stations I think there's some interesting things going on there podcasting if you look at English language podcasting here in Australia the most listened to show
is a true crime show that has a lot of American input into it there's a stuff you should know that's also up there as well So I think there's a fair amount of American content both here and in the UK but I think that's just the language And I think as soon as you skip out of that and you look into what the number one podcasts are in France in Germany and in Spain they're very different
when we looked at the Apple charts and Spotify charts from last week podcasting is still very localized it was just the way I saw the Spotify music list the same old names are all over the place Dre Kariana Grandy the interesting one Of course you listened to them regularly is the number one band in the world According Spotify was bad bunny from Puerto Rico obviously it's top of your list there
So
Puerto Rico up there
I if they're on YouTube music
but hopefully the location tag will be Useful if it's adopted certainly in localizing podcasts into local languages
certainly if you want to find out more about places then I think the podcast location tag is going to be really helpful
Now James have you got an idea for a podcast I know that you're so busy doing other podcasts but have you got an idea for a podcast
maybe
like $10,000
I would love $10,000 This is the audible podcast development program you could win $10,000 to develop your ideas one of the things I don't fully understand around Amazon who course owns audible is that they've got podcasts into Amazon music now in a number of countries which is great and you should be there but also they have a lot of their own original content in audible as well And some of those are podcasts so I'm a bit confused by that but in any case they want more great original
content So they've Put up 10 grants to develop your idea further it's open to every country in the world I went to have a look at the terms conditions that's a lot of money and you've until January the 18th If you've got an idea you should go to the audible podcast development program website and get it into them
Excellent I will be over Christmas coming up with another idea Sadly I don't think I'll be getting the $10,000 now good news or bad news I don't know Do you listen to Howard stern
I have never listened to Howard stern I'm told he's very good Sometimes I was never listened to how it's done
I haven't because he went over to Sirius but I guess with all of the Podcasts that are being acquired by Spotify I did wonder where the Howard stern would jump ship but it looks like he's staying put with Sirius for another five years
I think the story was that he was at least I talked to by Spotify and Spotify were very keen to get Howard stern involved Howard stern who's a very famous American shock jock He owns quite a lot of shares in Sirius XM and probably wanted to keep those being as full of value as he possibly could but he he signed for a further five years with the company which is a satellite radio company in the U S Sirius XM also they retain rights to his archives for a further seven years so
they can do other things with that what I found in No Where in any of the press releases which is weird because Sirius XM also owns things like Midroll Stitcher Simple Cast as well Great companies that are good at podcasting So I don't Quite understand what the deal is there in terms of why they wouldn't want to make how it's done into a podcast asset for them as well perhaps they do And perhaps they're just not saying anything about that yet It
makes sense in all the other acquisitions they've made recently Now moving on one of the other stories that caught my eye in a podnews.net this week was the daily Kevin LABAs is saying that it makes $42 million a year Now that seems a lot of money to me how do they make that money James And how do we make that money More importantly
Yes let's not go that far $42 billion a year Sounds like an awful lot of money And it probably is Kevin Lubars must be his real name he looked at a bunch of public information about what the New York times was saying and went for the number in the middle so there's a number which I believe is somewhere around 12 million There's a number which is significantly more $42 million a year is similar to the annual revenue of Wondery which I can believe So maybe the New York times
daily is big but it does have a bunch of other shows there as well So maybe it's making that amount of money I don't know it is predominantly around advertising of course although the podcast does clearly get more subscribers to the newspaper as well So we should probably not forget about that bit The New York times has also said that they're not having a very good quarter for of it their online advertising is likely to be down 5% and that includes the podcasting stuff as well Overall ad
revenue though is down by 20% in quarter four which I find strange because quarter four includes November which the there was a big election in the U S in November Why would people not be advertising around that maybe the New York times doesn't get very much political advertising
The fact that you've just talked about the New York times issuing awarding on digital advertising goes contrary to the other story that you published which was podcasting is becoming a more effective place to advertise which was a report from iHeartRadio
It was a inside a website called inside radio which is owned by iHeart radio And I only keep on mentioning the fact that it's owned by iHeart radio because they don't you won't find that fact anywhere if you run a radio news website and you're actually the main radio broadcaster in the U S you should probably make that fact a little bit more obvious but anyway yes they covered a survey of local advertisers by a company that begins with a B and they said they
quoted some of this saying that it is now felt by local advertisers that podcasting is more effective Than it's been in the past and it's already beaten things like newspapers radio and TV advertising as well so that's essentially up to what a local advertiser thinks but it's still useful information in terms of actually seeing that local advertisers more interested in spending their money In terms of advertising again the podcast location tag might help them there
seeing that kind of information is always useful it's always good to see a bunch of different surveys which you actually understand what advertisers think because if advertisers like what you're doing then that typically means that more money will come into this space at some point
Another related story that I was reading in pod news this week was you talked about the fact that 56% of heavy podcast listeners think that the number of ads in podcasts is increasing and 38% believe it's too many So again we've got this real struggle going on between people wanting to make money the daily wandery ourselves everyone else who are creating the content and listeners who really don't want more and more ads being thrown at them So what's the balance Where's the perfect sweet spot
it is interesting obviously people the more ads that you sling into a podcast the more money you can make but there is a balancing act there in between the amount of ads That you can put into a podcast before people get really annoyed And I think again it's a cultural thing I grew up in the UK I grew up with the BBC Mostly the BBC carries no advertising whatsoever And if you have grown up with media that carries no advertising At all then one 32nd dad is Oh my goodness what's
this so there's a big difference there I think in comparison to the U S where the amount of advertising that you have in TV shows in radio broadcasting is really high I remember going out in about 2005 I did a really interesting trip to the U S I was visiting lots of different companies including serious the satellite radio company at the time a bunch of other radio broadcasters as well as people like the RIA and others And we had the Rab who's the radio advertising Bureau there and the
Rab where I'm very excited about the fact that they had a radio station somewhere in the South which was broadcasting 48 minutes of ads an hour And they said that this was a brilliant thing And I not to mention 48 minutes of ads an hour what would you put in the other 12 minutes exactly but I think there's again big cultural Differences and you'll know I remember when we started getting satellite TV in the UK and you had some American companies coming over and they used to
put the ads after the intros of the shows which is how it works in the U S it's not how it works in the UK And so you're sitting there you watch the little theme tune and then it breaks for an advert and everybody who's going what's going on here So there's this whole sort of culture thing which I think is really interesting
I think you'll be good to see in 2021 whether we will get a Balance between how we podcasts make money I think that is the biggest challenge And I think your next week showed I don't mean to forward sell but I am the fact that Adam and Dave will be talking about how they're putting in a monetization capability into the namespace because unless monitorization does happen with podcasting and it becomes Democratize down the long tail Then I think a lot of the small players
in podcasting will disappear and we will end up with walled gardens sadly which is not what we want with Amazon and Spotify just Sucking up all the big podcasts
I think that's important And I think it's important to make sure that it's not just advertising as well It's all kinds of other things the thing that's annoyed me most this week in terms of the news coverage of podcasting is people saying that very soon podcasting will be a $1 billion industry when actually if you were only to look outside of the U S it's already a $1.4 billion industry and that's advertising only So Patrion selling gigs selling merch people supporting you
in other ways is considerably more than that as well So this is not just a billion dollar industry It's significantly larger and that's a good thing And the other thing on that is actually making sure that we're measuring the right thing making sure that we're measuring yes downloads but also other things as well So the IB brought out a new podcast guidelines this week version 2.1 of their podcast measurement guidelines which has very very little similar to the current version 2.0
that we've got but it has tightened up a few things I've already got my reaction to that into the IAB cause I think there are a few things that they could say that would make life a little bit easier but it's fascinating seeing the IIB working on measurement and making sure that all of that is further tightened up as well
Great make sure you go on pod news.net find the link and input your opinion Otherwise it will be Posted and hosted on you now over to you James
Yes One of the things we wanted to do in pod land is to spend a little time talking to those making the news in podcasting a little time obviously not a three hour long interview because both Sam and I have a full head of hair Now this week Sam talked with Sam yang from Otter AI alter AI is a live transcription service in the U S
Sam Hello how are you Hi
Sam Very good How are you
Good to see you again My friend now alter AI It's a brilliant product but for those who don't know it please can you just give us a brief background of what altar AI is and what it does
Of course honor is a automatic and meeting note service speech recognition system was artificial intelligence It doesn't require any human menu transcription
I've been using ultra AI with the tight zoom integration that you have
What
sort of examples or use cases would you say people are using author AI for
The biggest use case these days are using Otter for wear to meetings with COVID-19 obviously most people are working from home and also a lot of companies have distributed workforce they work in different time zones So they use zoom or other words to meeting system to have meetings either internal meetings or external meetings with tremendous number of meetings It's really hard to track information hard to remember things now the people using Otter to take meeting
notes and it's also a collaborative meeting notes because the meeting notes is automatically generated during the meeting available to all the meeting attendees everybody can see the meeting notes live even if they're completely distributed not only they can save in those life it can scroll back They can search for any keywords people can insert pictures screenshots or slide into the author note as well Also when you hear important information important numbers you don't
want to forget you can easily highlight the information which helps you find the information later really fast in addition a lot of universities are using Otter for online education because a lot of classes are online over zoom or Microsoft team or Google meet people in universities are using Otter to take automatic lecture notes as well It's also makes asynchronous learning better for students who Are located in different times zones They missed a live class but one day the
cat the class recorded previously they don't have to Goes through the classic quench or some students wanting to do it faster so they can actually search for keywords read the transcript and decide which part of the BDO they want to watch So it's possible to actually finish a class faster than the actual class time
Exactly my daughter had Nottingham university already uses auto exactly for that
Oh that's great We have hundreds of universities using hotter now it's growing even faster every month Now
since we last spoke about a year ago how has the trend scription has that become much more accurate over time or will we see it become even more accurate I'm looking at it now obviously with my life nodes coming down here and it's very accurate But can you get it better or are we at peak performance
absolutely Since we talked last year the accuracy has been actually improved significantly get those noise better even if your zoom call has pretty strong background noise Otter is able to transcribe it PR accurately another important enhancement we're handling more accents even better this is partially due to our very sophisticated training system In addition the users because the number of users is growing so fast from users all over the world they actually
have different accents people from UK has different access than people in the us even within the us different people in Texas kind of London New York have different accents Otter is able to use the information to Automatically improve its own accuracy and other important enhancement is that we have even better custom what capillary function customer covering means that or users can actually insert new words into otters Dictionary for their own meetings So this is very
useful for a lot of companies and have many special terminologies special acronyms and also not uncommon names or other names or standard English names that are available in the English dictionary Our users actually can inject those names and words into Arthur upfront so that those words can be accurately recognized
now two new features obviously live notes which I'm using here with also and it's instantly transcribing those notes in front of me As you described earlier one of the other features is life captions So can you tell us more about that function that you've added
I like Caption is part of the live notes the only difference is that the live caption is displayed in the zoom video screen at the bottom and the light there one line or two lines of live captioned But we found that people actually like to open a bigger window so that they can see the full live notes on that larger screen or even a larger window so that they can see not only just two lines of texts they can easily scroll back and see more inflammation And again the
search ability is really useful The fact that you can see more in a previous text allows people to actually comprehend the meeting even better for certain meetings that are complicated where for example a lot of different numbers are discussed it's really hard for people to remember more than three numbers at a time So when you see all the numbers transcribed and displayed in front of you it actually helped people understand the information and improved their productivity there
Now one of the features that I would love to have given your heritage is from China And my heritage is from India is live translation Is this something that author are considering or may do in the future
absolutely will you actually Are partnering with NTT DoCoMo in Japan and if you do commonly largest telecom company in Japan they see that are have a great market in Japan they really want to use Otter in Japan for their corporate meetings a lot of their meetings are international but they really want to have the Japanese translation So we actually work with the Oklahoma We created a prototype I actually we demonstrated early this year in Tokyo and it was before COVID happened I went
to Tokyo and in DoCoMo's open house conference we actually demonstrated that it's possible to run outer life notes And to show the Japanese translation in real time So definitely our real map that we cannot give an exact timeline when we can release it yet but that's
going to be very powerful when you can start to have multi-lingual conversations and see that happening in real time It really is the Bible fish in it Come to life
absolutely The word even smaller
Now you talk about search within live notes which is great Is there any way that I can aggregate all of my corporate notes or my personal notes into one repository and search across all of my live notes So say I've got five or six lectures or five or six meetings And I just want to find anything that I referenced a certain keyword Is there a way that Alta provides me an aggregated live notes Repository
absolutely And that function is actually already available in order if you look at your own art can't there should be a search bar on the top and in your honor app when you search for keywords is actually search across all your previous author notes honor also provide a way for you to organize your notes in a better way especially when you are working together with many other people in your team for example in our team we have I product team we have an engineering team marketing team and sales
team each team have their own recurring weekly meetings and sometimes hoc on demand meetings So autumn team meeting in each team are automatically shared with the Otter group Corresponding to their team membership so that everybody in their team whether they attend the meeting live or not they all get access to the alter notes So that's why we say Otter actually helps people improve their collaboration communication because the information is easily shared then within each group or
across The entire repository people can search for any inflammation as long as they have the permission There's a way to specify the permission access like each alternate user in the team So the team product is actually even more powerful so that people can use that in a similar way as Slack although Slack folks text-based and messaging but Otter focused on all the voice content but the concept is actually quite similar between hotter and Slack
last question then Sam what's on the roadmap beyond this you seem to have got everything covered You've got improved transcription You've got captions you've got load notes You've got enterprise search ability What's next Or what's on your horizon Do you think Coming in 2021
lots of things on our roadmap We're going to do even more smooth integration with additional features working with zoom and also more integration with other words meeting systems like Google meet Microsoft teams WebEx so that the experience can be even more automated and even more pain-free secondly even better collaboration system for team members allow people to Add annotations even better today You can already add a notation into order that we're playing
to make that even better the other things include analytics of the meeting content so that people can find numbers find other important information even easier certain concepts certain keywords were important sentences late in the future It can be automatically highlighted or identified so that improve people's productivity even better other integration we're going to work on as I mentioned Slack and other productivity tools like a sauna at last thing or going to do some more
integration with those tools as well So that auditor we see will be a Trinsic part of people's workflow and this is going to be the future of work That's brilliant
Now last one thing that I know that you provide within the auto notices a metadata tagging system at the top So like a summary of the information is this going to happen with live notes Can I take this meeting that we're doing here on zoom Can I at the end of this meeting have a summary in effect by it by also looking at the key words within the live notes and then highlighting those at the top
Oh absolutely These summary keywords will be generated pretty fast Once the meeting is finished it will show up for your life notes as well
Brilliant Sam Liang Thank you so much for your time Everybody should be using oughta Certainly if there is a zoom user and looks like if you're going to be any other type of user of any conferencing software as well in the future Sam take care speeches
Thank you Great speaking with you
Sam yang from auto AI with some really helpful things particularly if you use zoom which is good Sam Stephie what's coming up in pod land for you later this month
I'm going to be interviewing a Boucher and setting no relation to me at all he reached out to me over LinkedIn He's creating the world's linking of the Sethi clan by all accounts And I happened to be one of them but he's the global leader of people in organization PWC in New York And we're going to be talking about the future of work and how you get there
Which is good and I will be sitting and writing I've got an awful lot of writing papers for individual companies None of whom I can talk about but I've been learning
always helpful on the podcast
It's always helpful on a podcast but I've been learning an awful lot about how the New Zealand media industry works ask me anything about that except don't obviously because I'm doing that for a client so that's all good And I think that's it for this week If you've enjoyed your trip to pod lands don't make it your last you can subscribe on all the major podcast players or you can visit our [email protected] I
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Now if you want daily news you should get pod news It's [email protected] It's very good too Or you can ask your smart speaker to play the news from pod news podcasting news And it'll either do that for you or it'll give you some sort of spirits error message A pod news is also where you'll find the links for All the things that we've mentioned this week, music is from ignite jingles. Sam used zoom plus Autor live notes to interview Samuel Yang.
pod land was edited by Sam Sethi and descript, and we're hosted and sponsored by Buzzsprout. And we'll see you in pod land next week. Keep listening.