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April 11, 2024 • 15 mins
In this episode, we talk to Ian Harris about his AI-enabled podcast production company, Pulse Podcast. With the podcast listener base expected to reach between 400 and 500 million in 2024, Ian delves into how this medium has transformed from a niche hobby to a global phenomenon. He discusses the unique ability of podcasts to connect with audiences on a deeply personal level, making it a potent tool for marketers. Ian shares how Pulse Podcast leverages AI to streamline the production process, from scripting to voice acting, allowing creators to publish more content with less effort. This conversation illuminates the evolving landscape of podcasting, where technology and creativity intersect to redefine storytelling.
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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Tectastic, where we navigate theintersection 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.

(00:20):
So you have Pulse podcast, which is a AIenabled 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 inregards 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.

(00:42):
Wow.
That is an astounding number of people as amedium you can reach across the planet.
Do you remember podcast used to be like thiskind 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 makinga podcast about the thing that you care about.

(01:06):
And, a lot of the research bears the fact thatpeople love podcasts because if they have a
particular point of view or they live in aparticular city or they originally do a
particular type of technology, they can reachpeople that, of similar minds.
And if you want to reach your audience as acompany doing a podcast is obviously a great
way of engaging people because as you know,people listen to podcasts more than they read a

(01:29):
headline.
I might catch a headline number or somethingand get some impression, but if you can get
half an hour or someone time.
I mean, just it's in con from a marketingperspective, it's inconceivable to be able to
get 30 minutes for someone's time talking aboutsomething that is in the right system, fuel
grant.
It it's an amazing opportunity for marketersand for and for the listeners who you get what
they really care about.
One of my favorite sales leaders that Iinteracted with was talking about, people don't

(01:52):
buy from a brand because it's the brand.
They buy it from the brand because it's a aknown commodity that they trust.
They've developed trust with it.
It's like a human being.
It takes about 4 hours of interaction with ahuman being for you to start the trust person.
And a podcast, if you're doing a 15 minutemeans you've gotta do that 16 times, right, to

(02:12):
get to a trust level.
Right?
That's it.
Now if you listen to me sixteen times, youprobably trust me who knows?
You know, the audience is definitely laughingbecause they're like, nope.
Never.
Yeah.
But one of the other things you said, I Ithought I, for sure, you were gonna say, there
are now 400,000,000 people producing podcastsbecause it often feels like that.
Well, that's also true.
There is about 400,000,000 podcasts weirdlyenough as a kind of coincidental number.

(02:36):
Now a lot of these podcasts never quite make itbeyond 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 ofcontinuation of that journey.
But nevertheless, you can already see that forall the things that you care about.
There is someone out there that also cares thatwants 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, forexample, 78% of Americans are aware of

(03:01):
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 findsomeone that really doesn't know what a podcast
is.
I mean, it's on everyone's phone now, so it'shard to kind of miss that.
So so we kind of established a podcast, greatfrom a marketing perspective.
If you're a company that's trying to reachpeople on a, I mean, on a on a longer sales

(03:22):
cycle or or you're a city or a, you know, localgovernment area that wants to be able to
regularly communicate with people.
Yeah.
You're probably producing marketing materialalready.
You're producing newsletters.
You're producing blog posts and so on.
It makes sense as we've been talking about thata podcast is a great way of bridging that gap
between people that are, they really want thatinformation, but, time poor in terms of being

(03:42):
in front of a screen.
They might have a drive, 15 minutes, 20minutes, 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 aninteresting topic while they're commuting.
So, okay, podcasts are great, but the challengefor making a podcast, I'm sure, as you know,
that, and we're we're not scripted.

(04:03):
We're just we're just chatting But if youreally care about your brand and you wanna
script something, then you have to have acontent writer that's gonna actually write the
script or the topics or even even just to comeup 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 allfun, and that that barring phases of buying
microphones and audio gear is, I I think it'sgreat fun.
That's and then you have to edit the thing.

(04:24):
You have to actually cut the bits out thatdon't work and join them all up together again,
and you get better at that over time, but itdoes 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 aregular basis.
And as as you said, the continuous nature ofthat communication is important, you know,
putting out regular podcasts is important, thatkind of continuousness, the relentlessness of

(04:47):
podcasts, is important.
And so you can't just put out 1.
That's almost not worth the MD at all, but evendoing on a regular basis is fundamentally the
cost benefit analysis and doing hard from amarketing perspective And so at post podcast,
we started off thinking, we love podcasts.
We love to help people make podcasts, but whatwe kept finding is that as we were talking to
people, they love the idea of podcasts.
They're totally persuaded by know, from abudget perspective, it's really hard to justify

(05:10):
email cost it takes.
And so we kind of combined some of the thingsthat I've been doing in the past in terms of
building technology platforms, and thought, howcan we join those things together in a way that
gives us the ability to get podcasts out thatactually sound good in a way that can reduce
that Christian that's where polls podcasts gotits feet, got its beginning, and that is we try

(05:30):
to build a platform that enables people thatare already producing content.
So you're already making a a newsletter a blogpost on a regular basis, but you'd love to have
it as an audio version, and not just a read outversion, 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.

(05:51):
In fact, if you listen to the podcast of theintro, that is clearly an AI voice actor.
Right?
And the script itself was written by another AItool, and I I liked that as a Here's the
starting point a year ago when we started doingthis is what the best of the best sounds like.
So we are getting to that point now where I'mgonna and we use the word believable, but I
think a better word is probably engaging in asmuch as you can now listen to some of the best

(06:16):
AI voices and you forget that you're listeningto an AI voice and you get engaged in the
content that they're talking about, it's the AIvoices are not perfect.
But then, you know, as you can hear mestumbling 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.

(06:37):
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 thiskinda works for us.
I was chatting to a friend of mine who, is deepinto the insurance industry insurance tech.
I didn't even know there was a big insurancetech industry, but apparently there is.
It makes, I mean, it makes perfect sense whenyou 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

(07:02):
podcasting.
That's really interesting because I get thisnewsletter 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 wholeton of insurance tech news out there, but there
will so there is Hammer all the headlines, allthings 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 thenews.

(07:24):
My problem is that I don't have a lot of screentime.
I mean, that working in meetings or I don'treally just sit around, you know, add a screen
able to reap, but I do have a, you know, halfan hour commute where I drive.
I wish I had an audio version of the newsletteras a podcast.
That's exactly what we do.
So my friend, I'm gonna put me in touch, withthe guys to make this newsletter and we had a
chat.
And I said, why don't I send you a version ofyour newsletter as a podcast?

(07:47):
Admittedly, I think they were probably a littleCool.
I mean, the insurance techings for using a manis deeply technical and deeply insurances.
Like there's, you know, in the make lecture andthe terms and stuff.
I don't understand it all.
And so what we need is we use our platform totake, we grabbed a copy of the newsletter, and
we feed it into the platform.
The platform takes the raw content, it breaksit down into segments, then it takes the

(08:09):
segment and creates a script segment, then itjoins all those script segments together, and
then we run it through an AI again to kind ofjoin up everything to make it sound a little
more like it's, there's over a kind of storyarc and a flow and you bring things back
together again at the end and And then we takea 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 itinto, some very advanced AI voice engines,

(08:34):
which then enable us to create the voices forthat.
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 theactual 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 audiodepending on how long the actual voice is and
had phagings and fade outs, then we normalizeall that, so it all sounds good.

(08:56):
An audio perspective.
And then we get the AI to write a descriptionof the podcast because you normally have the
description as part of a podcast episodeitself.
Create a title.
And then we, upload that to a podcastdistribution platform.
And out of that, we end up with a pretty nicesounding podcast version of a newsletter.
And so we sent these guys and said, Hey, here'sa version of your newsletter podcast November.

(09:18):
Their current reaction was a little hounded.
How do you know so much about the insuranceindustry and luckily enough, I could say, I
don't, but the AI seems to have picked up allthe 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 wordsthat are written on a page and you read them

(09:39):
out, They don't sound natural.
They don't sound like someone talking me.
It's not like you're reading words out on thepage, to be honest.
And so it's not engaging for some reason.
And so what we found is that by actuallycreating a script out of the the original
content, you get much better engagement, youget the ability to really link together themes
that are going on in different parts of the thecontent and really create an arc across that,

(10:01):
but a few minutes that you're talking aboutthat.
And so, now we're producing an audio podcastfor the insurance technology industry, which is
not something that was on my bingo card forthis year, but I'm excited about.
I'm I'm excited about the the opportunities fortaking this new type of AI creativity based
engines and using that for opportunities thatis not it's not about stopping people doing
things that they were already doing.

(10:22):
What we're really doing here is enabling awhole new area of access to content and access
to marketing and access to communication thatjust 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 pollspodcasts.com, which is your website, and just
went through and did the contact us to get setup to try it out.

(10:44):
This fits into my world on multiple fronts.
Excellent.
Excellent.
Right?
I have Valai.
Which has a lot of promotional material thatwe're always needing to create.
I have it's fantastic.
I have written more episodes than I could everrecord.
I have so many topics that I wanna talk about.
And I write so prolifically just as a normalpart of my life that there's just a ridiculous

(11:05):
amount of content I can pull from.
It would be fun to start doing some longer formepisodes that are taking those and turning them
into stuff.
And I might have to come back in and do somevoice over on parts of it, but the vast bulk of
it was able to be generated, and I didn't haveto 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 alot deeper with things.

(11:27):
Right.
I'm very interested in looking forward toseeing
it.
Good.
Well, that's exactly the sort of thing that wewanna be able to enable companies to do.
And I think that's an exciting opportunitywe've got here.
So, I mean, as part of this process, we wereexploring, how how far can we take this So
you're talking about having some great contentthat you've already created, but maybe we can
just refund.
We could get the AI to go and research thetopic itself.

(11:48):
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 thatgave us access all the global news sources.
Mhmm.
Every morning, we pull every single keywordbased article about artificial intelligence.
And then we take that and feed each individualarticle into the AI to say, would this be a

(12:09):
good topic that would suit a podcast about thetechnology of artificial So you can imagine
that, 50,000,000 things get flagged withartificial intelligence or have keywords in
them, but part of the challenge is actuallynarrowing that down to articles would be a
relevant and b actually sound good together.
So we narrowed that down, and then we look atthe previous articles from previous days to

(12:30):
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 previousweek of podcast?
Because talking about Saint not veryinteresting.
And then once we've got those articles, then wefeed it into that same platform that says,
okay, here's my original content.
I need to make a podcast out of Christian so wenow are producing a podcast every day on
artificial intelligence by artificialintelligence where the AI is actually even

(12:54):
choosing the articles.
So, and again, it's, surprisingly, it'sactually quite engaging and interesting.
And, you know, I do I genuinely learn thingsthat I would not have had the time to research
every day by going through all the newsarticles, by listening to this podcast.
So it's an interesting way of, also being ableto see what's out there in terms of news and
until into an audio form.

(13:15):
Hey.
Yeah.
We're at time, and I wanted to make sure thateverybody heard where to go.
It's pulse podcast.com.
But if they wanted to reach out to you directlybecause 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 tosome of the sample podcasts even if you don't

(13:36):
see use through it yourself, it's, it's a greatexample of some of the amazing stuff that AI is
now capable of in terms of creative scripts andactually of voicing itself just to see where
that's up to in terms of how we think it'spretty 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 dropus a note on the form there and, tell us what

(13:57):
you think of the, the podcast, any suggestions.
They don't always get it right, but, it's it'soften funny and and definitely informing.
So And we'd love you to check it out.
And, Christian, thank you so much for having meon the show.
I'd love to have you.
And that's a wrap for this episode ofTectastic.
Wanna thank you personally for joining us, andwe'll see you next time.

(14:19):
Until then, keep exploring, and stay curious.
Thank you for listening.
If you are new here and enjoyed the content,please subscribe.
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And if you are a regular listener, thanks somuch for your continued support.
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