Welcome to Tectastic, where we navigate the intersection of technology and business, uncovering innovations that redefine our world. The inheritance. Welcome to it's techtastic. It is lovely to have you here. Christian, it's great to be here. Thanks for letting me such an amazing podcast. My pleasure. So you have Pulse podcast, which is a AI enabled production company for producing podcasts. Is that the right way to describe it? That is exactly right.
I think what's interesting to talk about in regards to podcasts is that we're now at a point in 2024, they reckon, for people to know, that there's going to be about 400 and 500,000,000 listeners to podcasts in 2024. Wow. That is an astounding number of people as a medium you can reach across the planet. Do you remember podcast used to be like this kind of niche geeky thing where Yeah. Well, what's a podcast? What are you talking about? Now it's not a mainstream thing.
It's a it's a thing that everyone can reach. And one of the joys of podcasting, I think, overall is that whatever you are into, Whatever it is. There's a little niche of someone that's making a podcast about the thing that you care about. And, a lot of the research bears the fact that people love podcasts because if they have a particular point of view or they live in a particular city or they originally do a particular type of technology, they can reach people that, of similar minds.
And if you want to reach your audience as a company doing a podcast is obviously a great way of engaging people because as you know, people listen to podcasts more than they read a headline. I might catch a headline number or something and get some impression, but if you can get half an hour or someone time. I mean, just it's in con from a marketing perspective, it's inconceivable to be able to get 30 minutes for someone's time talking about something that is in the right system, fuel grant.
It it's an amazing opportunity for marketers and for and for the listeners who you get what they really care about. One of my favorite sales leaders that I interacted with was talking about, people don't buy from a brand because it's the brand. They buy it from the brand because it's a a known commodity that they trust. They've developed trust with it. It's like a human being. It takes about 4 hours of interaction with a human being for you to start the trust person.
And a podcast, if you're doing a 15 minute means you've gotta do that 16 times, right, to get to a trust level. Right? That's it. Now if you listen to me sixteen times, you probably trust me who knows? You know, the audience is definitely laughing because they're like, nope. Never. Yeah. But one of the other things you said, I I thought I, for sure, you were gonna say, there are now 400,000,000 people producing podcasts because it often feels like that. Well, that's also true.
There is about 400,000,000 podcasts weirdly enough as a kind of coincidental number. Now a lot of these podcasts never quite make it beyond twelve episodes. That seems to be the number for a hobbyist, particularly who wanna be able to talk about something and persist through that kind of continuation of that journey. But nevertheless, you can already see that for all the things that you care about.
There is someone out there that also cares that wants to talk to you that wants to be in your ear about that, and you wanna hear about it. And we're now at the point where in the US, for example, 78% of Americans are aware of podcasts. I think that's astoundingly low. I think that's probably a low figure. I think if you to someone on the street. I think it'd be really hard pressed to find someone that really doesn't know what a podcast is.
I mean, it's on everyone's phone now, so it's hard to kind of miss that. So so we kind of established a podcast, great from a marketing perspective. If you're a company that's trying to reach people on a, I mean, on a on a longer sales cycle or or you're a city or a, you know, local government area that wants to be able to regularly communicate with people. Yeah. You're probably producing marketing material already. You're producing newsletters. You're producing blog posts and so on.
It makes sense as we've been talking about that a podcast is a great way of bridging that gap between people that are, they really want that information, but, time poor in terms of being in front of a screen. They might have a drive, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour, morning afternoon. And a podcast is a great way of getting, communication to them in a way that they feel reaches them and, yeah, gives them an interesting topic while they're commuting.
So, okay, podcasts are great, but the challenge for making a podcast, I'm sure, as you know, that, and we're we're not scripted. We're just we're just chatting But if you really care about your brand and you wanna script something, then you have to have a content writer that's gonna actually write the script or the topics or even even just to come up with topics, time and energy, then you're gonna need to record it. You're gonna need equipment.
You're gonna need all that stuff, which is all fun, and that that barring phases of buying microphones and audio gear is, I I think it's great fun. That's and then you have to edit the thing. You have to actually cut the bits out that don't work and join them all up together again, and you get better at that over time, but it does that takes time time consuming as well.
And as a business, as a smaller business, especially, it's very hard to find the time or pay the money to do that sort of, activity on a regular basis. And as as you said, the continuous nature of that communication is important, you know, putting out regular podcasts is important, that kind of continuousness, the relentlessness of podcasts, is important. And so you can't just put out 1.
That's almost not worth the MD at all, but even doing on a regular basis is fundamentally the cost benefit analysis and doing hard from a marketing perspective And so at post podcast, we started off thinking, we love podcasts. We love to help people make podcasts, but what we kept finding is that as we were talking to people, they love the idea of podcasts. They're totally persuaded by know, from a budget perspective, it's really hard to justify email cost it takes.
And so we kind of combined some of the things that I've been doing in the past in terms of building technology platforms, and thought, how can we join those things together in a way that gives us the ability to get podcasts out that actually sound good in a way that can reduce that Christian that's where polls podcasts got its feet, got its beginning, and that is we try to build a platform that enables people that are already producing content.
So you're already making a a newsletter a blog post on a regular basis, but you'd love to have it as an audio version, and not just a read out version, but something that feels like it's an actual podcast. That part in particular is interesting because, I think it was like my 4th episode. I used a couple of the voice act AI tools. In fact, if you listen to the podcast of the intro, that is clearly an AI voice actor. Right?
And the script itself was written by another AI tool, and I I liked that as a Here's the starting point a year ago when we started doing this is what the best of the best sounds like.
So we are getting to that point now where I'm gonna and we use the word believable, but I think a better word is probably engaging in as much as you can now listen to some of the best AI voices and you forget that you're listening to an AI voice and you get engaged in the content that they're talking about, it's the AI voices are not perfect. But then, you know, as you can hear me stumbling over words, I'm not perfect either. So, you know, there you go, there you go.
Well, how much editing time is taken up, editing out the mistakes, the ums. Exactly. You know, all that. It's a ton of time. It it's such a big expense when it comes to Exactly. So I'll give you an example of how how this kinda works for us. I was chatting to a friend of mine who, is deep into the insurance industry insurance tech. I didn't even know there was a big insurance tech industry, but apparently there is.
It makes, I mean, it makes perfect sense when you think about if you've never been in a particular Anyway, so he's telling me, he said, you know, I I hear what you're doing about this podcasting. That's really interesting because I get this newsletter every weekday, and it's a kind of scan of all the insurance tech news.
I mean, again, I didn't know there was a whole ton of insurance tech news out there, but there will so there is Hammer all the headlines, all things that are happening summarization of the the kind of industry. It's changing fast. I need to keep up with it. It's important for my job. These guys do a great job of summarizing the news. My problem is that I don't have a lot of screen time.
I mean, that working in meetings or I don't really just sit around, you know, add a screen able to reap, but I do have a, you know, half an hour commute where I drive. I wish I had an audio version of the newsletter as a podcast. That's exactly what we do. So my friend, I'm gonna put me in touch, with the guys to make this newsletter and we had a chat. And I said, why don't I send you a version of your newsletter as a podcast? Admittedly, I think they were probably a little Cool.
I mean, the insurance techings for using a man is deeply technical and deeply insurances. Like there's, you know, in the make lecture and the terms and stuff. I don't understand it all. And so what we need is we use our platform to take, we grabbed a copy of the newsletter, and we feed it into the platform.
The platform takes the raw content, it breaks it down into segments, then it takes the segment and creates a script segment, then it joins all those script segments together, and then we run it through an AI again to kind of join up everything to make it sound a little more like it's, there's over a kind of story arc and a flow and you bring things back together again at the end and And then we take a get an intro.
And now it's where we join that up together, then we end up to another run through to make sure it'll make sense. And then we take that whole script and feed it into, some very advanced AI voice engines, which then enable us to create the voices for that. These are all little pieces. So we take all those pieces. We join them all up together. So now we have a voice recording of the the actual podcast itself, and then, we normalize that. So the audio sounds good.
Then we add a music track to the back of that. So we're take audio and we loop the audio depending on how long the actual voice is and had phagings and fade outs, then we normalize all that, so it all sounds good. An audio perspective. And then we get the AI to write a description of the podcast because you normally have the description as part of a podcast episode itself. Create a title. And then we, upload that to a podcast distribution platform.
And out of that, we end up with a pretty nice sounding podcast version of a newsletter. And so we sent these guys and said, Hey, here's a version of your newsletter podcast November. Their current reaction was a little hounded. How do you know so much about the insurance industry and luckily enough, I could say, I don't, but the AI seems to have picked up all the terms and knows what they mean and and strung it together in a way that makes sense.
And that if it's first up, you're like, well, we really want just an audio version of our newsletter. But as you know, when you actually use words that are written on a page and you read them out, They don't sound natural. They don't sound like someone talking me. It's not like you're reading words out on the page, to be honest. And so it's not engaging for some reason.
And so what we found is that by actually creating a script out of the the original content, you get much better engagement, you get the ability to really link together themes that are going on in different parts of the the content and really create an arc across that, but a few minutes that you're talking about that. And so, now we're producing an audio podcast for the insurance technology industry, which is not something that was on my bingo card for this year, but I'm excited about.
I'm I'm excited about the the opportunities for taking this new type of AI creativity based engines and using that for opportunities that is not it's not about stopping people doing things that they were already doing. What we're really doing here is enabling a whole new area of access to content and access to marketing and access to communication that just wasn't possible before, and I think that's a that's a good take on what's happening. That is amazing.
So while you were talking, I pulled up polls podcasts.com, which is your website, and just went through and did the contact us to get set up to try it out. This fits into my world on multiple fronts. Excellent. Excellent. Right? I have Valai. Which has a lot of promotional material that we're always needing to create. I have it's fantastic. I have written more episodes than I could ever record. I have so many topics that I wanna talk about.
And I write so prolifically just as a normal part of my life that there's just a ridiculous amount of content I can pull from. It would be fun to start doing some longer form episodes that are taking those and turning them into stuff. And I might have to come back in and do some voice over on parts of it, but the vast bulk of it was able to be generated, and I didn't have to do the production side of it either. So my producer could focus on this show. Right. That would be a huge advantage.
We could produce a lot more content and get a lot deeper with things. Right. I'm very interested in looking forward to seeing it. Good. Well, that's exactly the sort of thing that we wanna be able to enable companies to do. And I think that's an exciting opportunity we've got here. So, I mean, as part of this process, we were exploring, how how far can we take this So you're talking about having some great content that you've already created, but maybe we can just refund.
We could get the AI to go and research the topic itself. Like what if you just gave it a topic and said, I don't know, electric vehicles or, artificial intelligence, yeah, artificial intelligence. How about that? And so we, we subscribed to a new source that gave us access all the global news sources. Mhmm. Every morning, we pull every single keyword based article about artificial intelligence.
And then we take that and feed each individual article into the AI to say, would this be a good topic that would suit a podcast about the technology of artificial So you can imagine that, 50,000,000 things get flagged with artificial intelligence or have keywords in them, but part of the challenge is actually narrowing that down to articles would be a relevant and b actually sound good together.
So we narrowed that down, and then we look at the previous articles from previous days to sure that we haven't covered that previously. We, again, we use AI to do that by saying, here's the topic today. Has this topic been covered in the previous week of podcast? Because talking about Saint not very interesting. And then once we've got those articles, then we feed it into that same platform that says, okay, here's my original content.
I need to make a podcast out of Christian so we now are producing a podcast every day on artificial intelligence by artificial intelligence where the AI is actually even choosing the articles. So, and again, it's, surprisingly, it's actually quite engaging and interesting. And, you know, I do I genuinely learn things that I would not have had the time to research every day by going through all the news articles, by listening to this podcast.
So it's an interesting way of, also being able to see what's out there in terms of news and until into an audio form. Hey. Yeah. We're at time, and I wanted to make sure that everybody heard where to go. It's pulse podcast.com. But if they wanted to reach out to you directly because they wanted to hear more or if they wanted to book you for, the podcast themselves, how will they get hold of Ian? Oh, my email's iparrissetspulsepodcast.com. It'd be great to hear from you.
Check out our website and have it listen to some of the sample podcasts even if you don't see use through it yourself, it's, it's a great example of some of the amazing stuff that AI is now capable of in terms of creative scripts and actually of voicing itself just to see where that's up to in terms of how we think it's pretty much state of the art.
So if you get a chance to check that out, we'd, we'd love to have you on our website just to see, and to get your feedback well, just drop us a note on the form there and, tell us what you think of the, the podcast, any suggestions. They don't always get it right, but, it's it's often funny and and definitely informing. So And we'd love you to check it out. And, Christian, thank you so much for having me on the show. I'd love to have you. And that's a wrap for this episode of Tectastic.
Wanna thank you personally for joining us, and we'll see you next time. Until then, keep exploring, and stay curious. Thank you for listening. If you are new here and enjoyed the content, please subscribe. It really helps us out. And if you are a regular listener, thanks so much for your continued support. Overwhelmed by tech debt. Discover Vala AI. The solution to tech challenges with the simplicity of a click. No engineering background? No problem.
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