AI - new patents, and new Parkinson

• Podcast platform RSS.com has been awarded a patent for AI-driven, scalable ads. The AI-powered technology replicates a host’s authentic voice and style for ads that can be customisable in real-time using contextual data.

• A podcast hosted by an AI replica of Sir Michael Parkinson, a talk show presenter in the UK, is to launch, in spite of Parkinson passing away last year. The show has been produced with Sir Michael’s family estate, and will feature new chats with guests with an AI-powered voice trained on over two thousand of his interviews.

• What’s the biggest podcast on YouTube? It’s not Joe Rogan, says new research from Tubular Lab: Studio71’s Kill Tony more than doubled in watch-time in the last year.

• A new podcast newsletter has launched - the Indian Podcast List. The newsletter shares five Indian podcasts to your inbox every week.

• The Resonate Podcast Festival took place in Richmond VA. Wil Williams wrote it up.

• We’ve covered Intuit, the owner of MailChimp, before in Podnews - when it cancelled a podcast because it required all work to be performed by non-union workers. The company is now accused of insisting that part of a podcast interview on The Verge’s Decoder should be deleted because they didn’t like the line of questioning. The Verge declined. The questions were around Intuit spending $3.8mn last year to stop people filing US tax for free, and tricking people to pay for its products.

• Audacia Audio announced it has enabled multicultural targeting for audio advertising. The company has partnered with five of the leading media buying agencies.

• The End now lists over 1,000 fiction podcasts and audio dramas - all of which have reached the end of a season or storyline. The website and newsletter is curated by Evo Terra.

• In New Zealand, the accessmedia.nz podcast platform, run by the Community Access Media Alliance, has undergone a makeover. It contains more than a thousand podcasts generated by the twelve media organisations in the CAMA. The website is now mobile-friendly, and available in Te Reo Māori.

• EarBuds this week looks at Podcasts for the Season of the Witch - a set of curated Halloween-themed podcasts.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• RSS.com has made improvements to its chapter creation and editing experience. It’s also made changes to its podcast pages, and added filters for its analytics tool.

• Google’s NotebookLM has competition: Meta’s NotebookLlama, which, Techcrunch says, doesn’t work quite as well, but is entirely open-source. Here’s the Github repo.

• Pocket Casts v7.75 now shows HTML transcripts in a web view, in case individual creators are not clever enough to create a VTT file.

Tips and tricks - with Memberful

• Headliner shares why and how to create video clips to grow your show.

Podcast News

Educating to Be Human Podcast delves into the intersection of education, technology, and culture, offering insightful conversations that resonate with today’s pressing societal issues. It’s hosted by Lisa Petrides, and launched in August; the latest episode talks improv with Chris Miller, the co-founder of Life Plays, which uses improvisation as a tool to cultivate leadership, creativity, and innovation.

Anime is growing in popularity, and Do You Watch Anime? is a show where Adam Corky interviews guests about their favourite shows. Recent guests include Monica Flatley, Rebecca Danae and Corey Wilder - the show is celebrating its first year of podcasting.

Donald Trump says his appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, released late Friday, was the longest he’s ever done. The three-hour interview was fact-checked by the Associated Press.

The Podnews Weekly Review this week is a special, feature-length interview with Jack Sylvester - on Diary of a CEO and Flight Studio’s podcast innovations. Plenty to learn about how they do things, especially how they choose which episodes to release.

Object Diaries launched last week from Lisa Weiss, exploring the deeply personal stories behind everyday objects that reveal profound human emotions and connections. A recent episode examines a secret diary which reveals stories about mothers and daughters, about the secrets we carry, and how sometimes an ordinary object can become an extraordinary tool for healing.