Scout FM brings its personalized podcast experience to CarPlay and Android Auto

San Francisco CA, USA—Scout FM is a podcast radio service that streams a personally tailored selection of the best podcasts and radio shows. On June 27th, Scout FM is launching a new set of features designed for listening in your car, compatible with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. This includes Commute Mode, which finds shows that fit with users’ personalized commute times.

Instead of searching for, subscribing to, and downloading podcasts like in a traditional “podcatcher” app, with Scout FM you just start listening like you do with AM/FM or satellite radio. Scout FM has “stations” organized around topics like Daily News, Brain Food, and True Stories. The stations become personalized to you the more you listen based on what you listen to, skip, and favorite, just like Pandora.

Scout FM is bringing its personalized stations to car dashboards via Android Auto and Apple Carplay, so users can listen without touching their phone. The new version of Scout FM also introduces audio introductions before each episode, so that users don’t have to take their eyes off the road to find out what they’re about to listen to.

Bringing the podcast experience to cars

With this round of updates, Scout FM transforms podcasts from an inherently finite, on-demand experience best suited to short city commutes into a viable “always-on” replacement for AM/FM and satellite radio for the millions of Americans who have long commutes or drive professionally.

Most Americans commute to work, and these commutes range from a few minutes to hours a day. When Scout FM asked users during our research into why they don’t listen to podcasts while driving, the predominant responses were (1) they don’t have time to figure out what to listen to before they get in the car, (2) they don’t want to look at the screen while they are driving, or (3) the shows are too long and they hate ending knowing they won’t be able to find the show.

The way we listen to podcasts had to be redesigned from the ground up to solve these problems. With Scout FM, you just pick a station and are immediately listening to something good. Scout FM tells you a little bit about each episode before it starts playing so you can make sure it is something you are interested in. When you want to skip, you can use the buttons in your Bluetooth enabled car or Android Auto/CarPlay to go to the next episode. And with Commute Mode, you can let the app know how much time you have on your commute and the only recommendations you get will fit neatly into your drive. You never have to look at your phone, and you’ll finish your listening before you step out of your car.

For Android Auto or CarPlay - listeners plug in their phone as they normally would to charge it. Scout FM will automatically become available in the Android Auto/CarPlay menu of their dashboard. The screen in their dashboard will show their favorite stations, which they can just tap to play, and then use the built in buttons in their steering wheel to skip from episode to episode.

About Scout FM

Scout FM’s mission is to find you something good to listen to by creating personalized talk radio stations with the latest, highest quality radio shows and podcasts. Scout FM is different than most podcast listening experiences because it is designed for voice interfaces, like smart speakers and voice assistants. Scout FM can be downloaded on the App Store, Google Play, and as an Amazon Alexa Skill, and will now be compatible with CarPlay and Android Auto.

Scout FM was founded by Cara Meverden (CEO), previously a product lead at Medium, Indiegogo, and Twitter; Saul Carlin (president and COO), previously head of publisher development at Medium and a director of business and corporate development at Politico; and Daniel McCartney, (CTO) previously an engineer at GrubHub, Klout and Medium. Since its launch last month, Scout FM is averaging over half a million minutes of listening a month and will be crossing 2.5 million total minutes listened in the next couple weeks. Scout FM is backed by $1.4M in seed funding from Bloomberg Beta, Precursor Ventures, Advancit and #Angels.