Spotify uses AI for cloned voice translation

• Spotify is to use AI to clone the voice of podcast hosts into different languages. The tool will translate a number of podcasters, including Dax Shepard and Steven Bartlett, into different languages, as an initial trial. They’re working with OpenAI.

  • This isn’t a new technology. Hear our Editor translated into Spanish in the Podnews Daily podcast today - from almost two years ago.

• Podcast Radio is to launch in the US in Detroit, Tampa, Charlotte and Ft Myers, working with Beasley Media Group and KMG Networks. AdLarge Media will facilitate network ad sales. The stations will be hosted by “podjocks” including former KROQ-FM personality Gene “Bean” Baxter. Podcast Radio has been operating successfully in the UK since February 2020.

  • The first radio station in the US to broadcast 24/7 podcasts was San Francisco’s KYCY, on-air as KYOU, in May 2005 (Dave Winer was the first show aired). Adam Curry also started programmed “Adam Curry’s PodShow” on Sirius Satellite Radio the same month. iHeart has also a few channels, which haven’t had the best reviews.

• How do you market your podcast? What are your biggest challenges? Capsho is keen to find out in a survey - it’ll take less than ten minutes to fill in.

• Listenbox says it offers a way to subscribe to your favourite YouTube podcast in any podcast player.

• UK comedian Russell Howard is to launch a podcast of his own. Wonderbox will launch in mid October.

• And that’s the end of that chapter: Archewell Audio, the company owned by Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, have abandoned their application for an “Archetypes” trademark. The podcast was axed by Spotify in June.

Tips & Tricks

• What podcast format works best for brands? Who better to ask than Pacific Content?

Podcast News - with Airwave

From the Airwave podcast network: Shadow Realm is back for a new season. A San Francisco teenager finds out he has magical powers after falling through a fault in the earth and into some mythical lands. But - can he save his friends?

Ask Men Anything is new today from the Betches network. It’s by NYC comedian Emma Willmann, and she’s on a mission to answer the one question that has stumped our universe for centuries: Why do men…? Each week, Emma is inviting some of the funniest and most interesting men she knows into the studio to ask the biggest, weirdest, and most pressing questions of Earth’s most mysterious beings.

Peter and the Acid King, a co-production of iHeartPodcasts and Imagine Audio, is new this week. The show dives deep into the grimy, chaotic world of the Los Angeles punk scene in the early 80s to tell the little known story of an unsolved case - the brutal murder of a TV host.

The scripted podcast Case 63 returns today for a second season. All 10 episodes will be available for listeners to binge on premiere day on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Spotify tell us it was the most streamed scripted podcast in the world; and was adapted from the original show from Chile.

Podcast promotion in the wild

The Overlook with Matt Peiken, a show about the news, arts, issues and trends of Asheville NC, has just got a double-sided billboard on Business 19, a two-lane highway between the towns of Asheville and Weaverville. Perfect for a hyperlocal podcast: and a super-clear billboard with the name of the show and its local credentials.