24: Using AI for Revolutionizing Podcast Production with Ian Harris

In this episode of "Using AI at Work," host Chris Daigle interviews Ian Harris, a tech expert revolutionizing podcast production through AI. Ian discusses how Pulse Podcasts leverages AI to streamline the entire podcasting process, reducing production time from hours to minutes. They explore the transformative potential of AI in creating high-quality audio content efficiently and affordably, making it accessible for businesses of all sizes. Ian shares insights into the future of AI in content creation, the importance of creativity, and practical applications for integrating AI into everyday business processes. Join Chris and Ian for an engaging conversation about the cutting-edge advancements in AI and their impact on podcasting and beyond.

🔎 Find out more about Ian Harris and Pulse Podcasts:
https://pulsepodcasts.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian-harris-71751b3/

🛠 Tools & resources mentioned in this episode:
ChatGPT ➡ https://www.openai.com/chatgpt
Resemble AI ➡ https://www.resemble.ai
Opus Clip ➡ https://www.opus.pro/clip
HeyGen ➡ https://www.heygen.com

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Ian Harris
02:12 The Birth of Pulse Podcasts
06:46 Transforming Newsletters into Podcasts
09:38 AI in Voice Generation
15:10 Cost and Time Efficiency
21:14 Multilingual Podcasts
27:40 Creative Potential of AI
31:24 Future of AI in Video
38:16 Accessibility and Ease of Use
42:49 Closing Remarks


Be sure to download this week's Smartcut/s:
🔸 Effortless Podcast Scripts Using Perplexity — https://smartcuts.io/24

And check out the related prompts at: https://PromptVault.studio 

Pre-roll add for my private practice

This gives an example from US Compliance and promotes the $50,000 Opportunity Call

This version of the post role mentions Chief AI officer and my private practice

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Introduction to Ian Harris

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Welcome back to Using AI at work. Today, I'm excited to have Ian Harris join me as our guinness. Ian is a seasoned tech expert with a passion for leveraging AI to streamline business processes. Currently, he's revolutionizing podcast production with pulse podcasts, making high-quality audio content accessible and affordable for everyone. In this episode, we'll explore how Ian is using AI to transform podcasting, reducing production time from literally hours to minutes, and creating new opportunities for content distribution at ease for businesses of all sizes. Get ready for an insightful conversation about the future of AI and content creation. Let's get started. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Dagle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. All right, Ian, welcome to Using AI at Work. And before we get started, why don't you tell everybody a little bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_01 2:00

I've been I've been working in technology for decades, really, a long time. I've always been fascinated with computers and making things work and communications and uh and as that kind of evolved into platforms and and cloud, moving our servers into the cloud, uh, I got involved in building platforms for helping businesses, helping to run their business, helping to do things more efficiently, helping to uh provide services out onto the internet. And as part of that, uh what has been fascinating to me lately is to see the progress of AI and how that can be used in in terms of servicing customers on the internet and uh and how that can change those platforms and change the way we do business. So I'm very excited to chat to you about this today.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Yeah, awesome. You're on you're in the right place. I did my background, yeah, for sure. Um so one of the topics, obviously, I have an interest in podcasting. That's something that we do here uh to help educate the marketplace on how to use AI at work. And I noticed that one of your big initiatives right now is pulsepodcasts.com, which well, I'll let you explain what that is.

The Birth of Pulse Podcasts

SPEAKER_01 3:03

Yeah, the the the fascination for me is that uh back back in the early days of podcasting, uh I started a podcast with with a friend, and we were in the broadcast industry. At that point, we were chatting about the technology changes in in the broadcast industry. And and it was a fun uh marketing exercise. Uh, it took uh took uh an hour or two to prepare the material. Uh, we then chatted for a while about the news articles that were were relevant on that particular day, and then uh and then I would I would sit there and edit the podcast after the fact uh and then uh and then distributed that um uh once that was done. And it was a it was a great exercise for me in terms of uh keeping up with what's happening in the news and having a voice out there in the industry. Uh, but it was it was a very time-consuming exercise, if I'm honest. I mean, I I loved it because I was interested in how it worked and and the process and and and having a voice. But the process of actually doing it, if I if I calculated the amount of time it took to get uh a 30-minute podcast out on the air, it would take something like seven or eight hours of actual elapsed time to get from not having the podcast to having the podcast out. Uh and so as I was in a reasonably large company at the time, they could afford to do that. That was great. Uh, but uh it it's really just not efficient for uh a smaller business or or even in if it's going beyond a beyond a hobby, hobbies are fine. But if you actually want to do this as part of your business, it's really hard to spend that amount of time in getting getting a podcast out and and having that voice out out in the industry. And so Pulse Podcast was was uh created to try and bridge that gap between uh doing a professional podcast, which uh absolutely Pulse Podcast has the ability to do that kind of thing. We have a lot of expertise in in professionally producing podcasts, so we can we can script it, we can write it, we can uh get uh professional voiceover artists to do that. But what we've found is that when we started off down this route, uh that is really cost prohibitive for a lot of businesses. Uh so we found that either the business was so large they were actually able to do this themselves uh and they had the the in-house expertise to do that, or uh they just didn't have the resources or the money to be able to spend that on something that uh, and let's be honest, podcasts are a kind of slow burn. Um what it where is the gap there? How can we how can we bridge that? Uh and just just to chat a little bit about podcasts itself, from a from a marketing ex uh exercise, podcasts are a great way of reaching a very niche audience. So if you're into uh what's a good example? So I was chatting to a couple of folks this week who are in the insurance technology business. Uh and uh this is this is apparently quite a large industry. Uh I don't know anything about insurance technology, but uh you can imagine there's uh there's quite a bit there. Uh but for them, they produce a newsletter every week and they produce the, they spend the time in kind of collating news articles and and producing this uh this newsletter to get this out into the world. And I was chatting to them about the the possibility of turning that into an actual podcast. Uh and they they spend the time creating this newsletter. Um this uh they run a can run an insurance technology consultancy, so they don't have a lot of time. They they they spend the time doing uh getting this newsletter out. But for them, the exercise in then having them chat through the news articles and then being able to edit that and then put that up, that's another whole bunch of hours in their week that they don't have. Uh, and so for Pulse Podcasts, our opportunity there is to say, okay, how can we use AI to take away some of that, some of that work so that I get the value of that niche access to that particular industry without actually having to spend all that time. Because for me, for them, there's a there's a trade-off between that time and the and the value. The return on investment is just not there for them for a professional, professionally produced podcast, which for a half-hour podcast can easily be a couple of thousand dollars, three, four thousand dollars, uh, by the time you've got voiceover artists and script writers and editors and then uh audio editors, uh, and then actually uh mixing it and then producing a great I mean you can produce a great result, but uh for that amount of money, it just wasn't wasn't worth it to them.

unknown 7:10

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 7:10

So what we've done is we've started to use generative AI to help with the creation process. And so these guys have produced this amazing newsletter, and what we do is we feed the newsletter into uh an AI that has been trained on uh understanding how to turn uh the the words that are in basically kind of news summary lists, a newsletter basically, and turning that into a podcast script. Now,

Transforming Newsletters into Podcasts

SPEAKER_01 7:37

a podcast script is a very different uh you know even as I'm kind of stumbling over my words here, uh we speak very differently to how we how we write. We can write perfect words or we write perfect sentences. But when we're when we're actually speaking, it's a very different dialogue. We kind of, you know, we're we're we're stringing words together in our heads as we go along, sometimes better than others. Uh and um that that kind of sense of time and the sense of uh the way we word things is very different in a in a podcast script, in a in a written script, than it is from uh a newsletter or a piece of writing. It's almost like we kind of need time in our heads. We we kind of stick words in as well to kind of let our brains catch up with all the words that are being said. So that this was an interesting exercise for us. Could we get AI to help us to turn these sort of newsletters or blog posts or something like that into a podcast script? That would that would save a ton of time, because then you don't need someone to sit there and edit it into a script and how you say the right words and and and and stringing things together in a in a nice way. That would be an interesting exercise. And then uh at the other end of that, uh, we've been working with some uh some uh generative voice uh AI engines that allow us to create the actual voice itself. Okay, well, there's another step that we don't have to worry about now. If we can get something that is able to take the script and turn that into the actual voice, that would be amazing. And a couple of years ago, this was uh a very unlikely thing to be able to do. You had um voices that sounded very robotic, you could hear the and you could understand the the words, I guess, but they were kind of like little bits of words strung together. Uh and so they sounded uh that sounded quite robotic. Um and it was very difficult to uh to make it sound professional and it definitely didn't sound like uh people that were actually um uh knowing what they were talking about. It's like, yeah, yeah, it just didn't have that catchiness. It sounded like I'm I'm I'm listening to a talking alarm clock, basically. Um but the new the new engines that are coming out now are so realistic that in fact they can string words together together better than better than most non-professionals, me included. Uh and it means that we can go from having uh a newsletter and turn that into a script now, and then in fact, the way the the process works is we actually take the script and then we re-edit the script. We actually run through the script again and and link it together in different ways and and make sure the the there's an intro and an outro and make sure the whole thing folds together.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

Um is that a human doing that part, or is that also automated or AI?

SPEAKER_01 10:07

That's also that's also AI as well. And so we give them what's the topic of the newsletter? We need an intro. This is the name of the host, and you've got an outro, and you want to talk about this at the end. Uh, then we string that all together. And then we get the actual uh AI to voice it. And once we've voiced it, uh then the the AI voices are still the quality is amazing, but they actually only produce little segments. So

AI in Voice Generation

SPEAKER_01 10:29

we string that together and and make sure the gaps in between those segments uh work nicely. And then we uh mix in some music with that, fade the music in at the beginning, we fade the music out at the end, and then once we've done that, we upload that into a podcast distribution system uh that gets it out to the world. And so now we can go from having a newsletter to actually being able to deliver that out to the world uh with actually no humans being harmed in the process.

SPEAKER_00 10:56

So I I I want to do a before and after if I could, real quick. You've obviously been producing audio, high-quality audio content for a while, right? Right. You referenced a price now that if somebody wanted to do it, let's say the old way, or have humans doing the work, it's about two to three thousand dollars in production cost for a 30-minute episode. Yep. Now, that's how how much time, how many hours of human contribution would that take, would you say? If we didn't want to say, listen, I don't trust AI, I want to do it the old way.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

How much time am I looking at to work with product? Good question. So you're gonna take a couple of hours to actually write the script in the first place, you're gonna take another hour to edit it for sure. By the time you've actually run that through, you've probably got some sort of uh check and approval process within the company to cycle that round. So some elapsed time, but uh some cross-checks there. Uh then you're gonna actually have to get someone to sit there and record it. So normally if you're doing recording uh with a voiceover artist, voiceover artists tend to have minimum times they can spend on things, so three or four hours minimum at that point. And then uh while they're recording, you normally have someone that's monitoring the recording, so there's someone sitting there as well. So you you've just spent now six hours uh doing that. Uh at that point, now you have audio that is ready to be edited. So you need someone that is going to sit there and work through that actual audio and chop out the bits of where I've said something and where I have said something else, and join the things together and make sure the timing's right and the levels are okay. That editing process takes about three times the length of the audio. So let's say that's 30-minute audio, it's gonna take an hour and a half. So you can see we're already at a considerable point of spending, let me see, is it about 15 hours now uh of of people's time in order to be able to get to that point. Uh and now you've you've pushed the button and off it goes into the world and gets distributed. That's great. Uh and then the thing about podcasts is that the they need to be relentless. Uh and you know this, Chris from from all your podcasts, the the the the value is in the fact that people know that you're gonna keep coming back with more great material, and so you just gotta do it again another week.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

So huge commitment.

unknown 13:07

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

Let's look at it this way. I come to you and I say, hey, listen, I write a newsletter, I do a weekly newsletter. I've got the content ready to go. If I give it to you and your team, what does that look like?

SPEAKER_01 13:19

Yeah, so if we do that uh on an in an automated fashion, then we can have it ready in about 15 minutes.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

At hopefully not two to three thousand dollars for that 15 minutes worth of work.

SPEAKER_01 13:33

A considerable saving. Yeah, you're looking at less than 10% of what you were before. Uh and and and that means that in in some cases even less if we're doing uh doing longer episodes or or doing more consistent consistent work. And that means that all of a sudden you're in a you you freed the you freed the time up for a start because I'm running a business. I don't have time for this. I want to do marketing, I want to get my message out, I want to be an authority in this particular area. Fantastic. But what is the what is the value for me in spending several thousand dollars when uh I don't know, I've got a few hundred listeners now. Like it's it's hard work to justify that. And let's hope that builds up over time, but everyone's looking at the amount of time and money you're spending on this, and it's just it's just not worth it. But now all of a sudden, for a few hundred dollars, which you know, we we're thinking we we as business people, I was thinking this in Google Ads and all that sort of stuff every every five minutes, uh, we can now have uh a direct link to the people that deeply care about the industry that that we're in, that care about what we have to say, that care about what's happening in that particular industry or particular niche. And uh, and and all of a sudden I'm reaching them for so much less money that the the return on investment per even per listener, per uh per hour, per minute, however you want to measure it, is all of a sudden like, okay, this now starts to make sense. Now I can use AI to deliver a product that gives me such value that it is all of a sudden a new area that I could ex could explore, could explore now that was just not worth it from a from a time and energy and money perspective that we could do previously. And that's I think the exciting thing about the the place that we're in right now.

SPEAKER_00 15:10

It's very exciting. So for any of you listening, if you have a newsletter that you're sending out to your prospects, to your customers, whatever the case might be, that is is the genesis of a podcast that would take using the Pulse Podcast methodology 15 minutes. And if you're not doing that, I mean, a number of things can occur once you create that podcast, now you've got additional content, even though it's that same newsletter that you can repurpose, that you can you know highlight clips from, you can run them through other tools like Opus and get the TikTok stuff, like

Cost and Time Efficiency

SPEAKER_00 16:30

all this stuff just from that newsletter. So, what I want you the listeners, I want you to be thinking about not just that that AI participates in your business in a discrete situation where it's like, oh, it helps me with email. Well, let's go upstream from that, let's go downstream from that. Where else can AI plug in for it? So this is fantastic, and I know I'm um when I introduce you to a previous podcast guest who that's what his business is, it's uh the generation of the newsletters very authentic for high profile clients. They're not doing this. I mean, that's a match made in heaven right there. That's a great link, isn't it? Yeah, fantastic. So um what would be the suggested frequency of publication in order to get, I don't know, maximum traction with somebody if they wanted to do this? Is once a week enough?

SPEAKER_01 17:22

Once a week is good. Uh you can you can have a good uh in-depth look at something once a week. So if it if it's a particular topic uh uh within within the within the niche that you're in uh that you want to explore in a given week, uh once a week is a is a great chance of spending spending 30 minutes talking about something that that really matters or the particular areas uh in a in in that context would be would be great. Uh but we do actually do daily podcasts. Um and so uh AI daily podcast, right? Indeed. So and this is a case where we've kind of stretched that out to the other end where the AI actually selects the news articles themselves and then strings them together into the script. So it's it's completely completely AI from beginning to end. AI about AI, it's very, very self uh self-referential there. Uh but so if you're doing it daily, then you kind of need a it needs to be kind of snippety, like uh not like the kind of audio version of a TikTok. And so we tend to think that the ones that are coming out daily should be three to five minutes, seven minutes, maybe ten minutes at the absolute most, um, where if you've got a little commute and you've got a little moment where you want to you're on your way to work and you want to hear about what the latest news in your industry is and you can grab that, then you can imagine that would be ideal. So instead of grabbing the the radio and and in your car and listening to whatever's happening today in the world, if you're in go heading into work and you want to hear about the latest news in your industry, and you just want the latest kind of top-ups of of things that have happened, then once a day for for five minutes is a great way of picking that up. And again, you know, like with most podcasts, the the news themselves, you know, it it it has relevance for some time afterwards. It's great if it's happening that day, perfect. But uh even then people we often find that people bunch them together and and they're oh yeah, I want to find out what's happening in the industry of AI, for example. And they pick up three or four episodes on their on their way in and just hear all the all the news that's happening. But they don't have to, you see, because it's because it's nice little chunks, uh they can consume that in a much more uh bite-sized bite-sized way.

SPEAKER_00 19:20

So a daily micro episode would be an alternative to the exact thing like that.

SPEAKER_01 19:25

Like the audio, we find that that's actually that's actually quite effective for being able to reach an audience. They they don't feel like they're committed for half an hour or an hour worth, or an hour and a half, my goodness, of um uh of content. Uh they can just really snack on that and you go, oh, that's really interesting. And you can you can cover three or four or five articles and and what that what that means to the industry. Um and the great thing about generative AI is you can you can teach it how to uh how to make those news articles or whatever it is you're talking about in the in the newsletter relevant to the industry that that you're talking about. What what does it mean that this thing has happened for this particular industry? What are the implications of that? What are the next steps? What does this mean? So it does actually help you to to draw that out and to give that a uh a little more than just kind of reciting the news, which you know a lot of newsletters um do tend to be uh this is the news, the thing that's happened, this is the kind of facts of the matter. But but what does it matter? So it gives you a bit more time to kind of flesh that out and give you a clue as to where you should look next. Um and I think that's that's an interesting part of that that process. And the other thing that that gives it a really nice there's a really nice uh uh part about uh the generative AI process is that you can give the podcast a voice. And by voice I mean what is the style of the sort of industry or the particular audience that you you want to reach? And some are some are serious and and uh straightforward business yeah, that's great, that's fine. Uh, but you can have it more silly, you can have it more kind of uh flamboyant, you can have it much more relaxed and casual, uh uh, you can have it more comedic. Uh so with even within that, depending on the particular audience and how you want to reach them, uh, you can actually change the style of the way the the podcast is written as well. And so that gives you an opportunity to reach people in a much more, you know, in a way that that suits the industry. It's not kind of not kind of stuck in a particular way.

SPEAKER_00 21:15

This is fascinating. So now as you're you're saying this, I'm realizing, okay, if I want to do this myself, I I no longer need to be a subject matter expert on that domain. I now need to be thinking how do I use these tools to produce this? Because I can go to the model and I can say, listen, I don't know a lot about um insurance technology, but guess who does? Chat GPT, right? And if I can get an article that that is relevant, if I as a marketer, if I want to penetrate that space or at least get some you know footing as a thought leader or whatever, I can now take that to Chat GPT with no domain expertise about that industry, ask it, say make this article relevant. Obviously, there'd be some more finesse in the prompting, but make this article relevant for that uh that community, and then all of a sudden now I've got podcasts and content being produced for that space, and I have no um like I'm new to the space. It's extremely interesting that that now becomes the the the way to think about it, not that oh, I need to go learn about this industry, I just need to learn the mechanics of communicating with that industry, and I can leverage that by accessing Chat GPT. So that's pretty fantastic. Um one of the areas of AI, generative AI, that's been of particular interest lately is the use of voice. Right? I've seen some of the demos. If anybody's seen the demo where there's the sales calls, and it's I mean, it's almost imperceptible that it's it's not a human being on the other line. Are you guys doing anything interesting outside of podcasting by by leveraging this these

Multilingual Podcasts

SPEAKER_00 23:02

uh voice engines?

SPEAKER_01 23:03

Yeah, we've done some uh done some work in terms of voiceovers for videos. Uh so similar sort of uh similar sort of uh vein, but not uh not not on a regular basis, on a one-off basis. I have a I have a video that I want to be able to voice. Um I don't have the time or energy to to get voiceover artists and pay them to do that, but I have an idea of what the script looks like. Uh can you take this kind of notes, dot points almost and turn that into a script and voice it into this this video? Uh and the results are quite astounding in terms of uh the not just the not just the the getting the words together that actually sound good, which is which is a b big step. Um Writing is a writing is a hard task. Uh but then actually being able to voice it is almost almost beyond even uh I mean, even if you're in a professional studio, it's hard to get really great sounding voice. It's really hard to get um uh e even even the best voiceover artists take many times over to get things right, and you want the right nuance, you want the right uh pronunciation, you want the right uh imagine being able to pull that back and say, I don't have to do the voicing, I don't have to do the recording. I can actually use AI tools now to describe how I want something to be said and I want uh it pronounced in this particular way. Uh you can tell my my accent, I'm Australian, I have an Australian accent. Uh so in Australia it matters that you have an Australian accent when you talk to people, for example, on videos. Uh so being able to specify the accent and how words are pronounced matters. Uh local place names that that need to be pronounced correctly. And so now we have that control back in the lay people, the people that are not voiceover people, the people that are not uh not uh telling people how to say things, the people that are not actually voicing them can say, ah, I want it pronounced this way, and I I have control of that. That is not something that um uh that I need to worry about giving that job to someone else. I can now be in control of that. And so for producing videos now, uh we can produce voiceovers that sound natural or sound excited or sound uh calm or sound relaxed. Uh and th those different uh nuances, you know, that that really matters. And the the the amazing thing is now that the quality of the voice is such that uh it's you know, it's actually engaging. It's actually engaging. And I and I use that word, I don't use that word lightly because uh if you if you have a listen to some of our podcasts and you're in listening in, you forget. Uh I mean you can kind of tell every now and then because you know they they AIs make mistakes in the same way that I mean humans make mistakes, we stumble over words and stuff. They don't stumble over words, but they kind of sometimes there's a little little different kind of gap or a slightly different pronunciation than you would have thought, and you you kind of like uh you can y it has a sort of uh that it's not it's not a hundred percent perfect, but compared to compared to me trying to string words together, uh it's quite amazing. It's quite it's a big step forward for me, for example. Uh or for any normal I mean I'm gonna say I'm normal, any normal human trying to voice things, it's it's a lot easier to to get a very good quality result. Astounding, astounding quality compared to uh and and and again, the the price is such that it enables you to do things that you wouldn't be able to do before. I would love to have a professional voiceover artist do my videos, but I cannot afford to do that. But now I have an opportunity to produce a much better quality result at a much lower price point, and it enables me to do something in my business that I couldn't do before. And this is the great joy of all this uh AI work at the moment. I I think there's some sense that people are worried that AI is going to take over the world or take over jobs, and and possibly there is some some chance of that happening. But I think the most exciting part of it is the the new opportunities that it gives us to do things in business that we didn't have a chance to do before. It just wouldn't be possible for me to do such good quality voiceovers or podcasts or whatever those generate text that uh you know, getting editors to do that, getting copywriters to do that. Some businesses just can't afford to do that. And now we have an opportunity to do such make such a better quality result at a price that makes sense for for smaller businesses for smaller opportunities.

SPEAKER_00 27:00

It's crazy because that's exactly it. It's not just about the cost, it's about hey, I'm running a business, man. I like I gotta make choices. There's only so many hours in the day. But now I can slice those hours, I can compress them into 15 minutes. That's incredible. Now, I want to ask you one of the things that we're doing, leveraging these voice engines, is uh taking the podcast into other languages. So now you've just expanded your marketplace. Like Spanish was a very easy choice for us for US base. Um Spanish is a large consumption uh avatar for podcasts that's underserved. Was underserved. I think that now that the tech is like, hey, let me upload this episode, and in 15 minutes I've got the Spanish version of it. And if you want to get really creative, you can do the video stuff that they're doing with Hey Gen with the lips matching and the your voice speaking another foreign language, right? It's like it's incredible. So that that newsletter, uh, you know, Mr. and Mrs. Listener, that newsletter that you've got or you've been thinking about doing, yeah, great. Email open rates, maybe you get 30, 40, 50% open rates, that's fantastic. But now you've got that one effort that's now turned into a multinational, multimodal, like multi, multi-platform, multi-channel, multimedium, multimedia, um uh distribution for something, and and none of this takes any longer than once it's set up, or you're working with the right vendor or whatever, you're talking about 15 minutes, like for, and that's not you pushing buttons for 15 minutes, that's you waiting on the the tool or whatever to render the video. That's you like checking Twitter while you're waiting for the output. This is this is something you could do while you're eating your you know, corned beef and cabbage for lunch or whatever the case might be. This is there's no the only excuse here is you thinking that this is hard to do. And the reality is that maybe it is, maybe maybe you want to do the who, not how. And what I mean by that is we we look at that in our business. If there's if there's an innate skill that we have, we do it. If there's something new, it's like, oh, well, we don't know SEO. Rather than learn the SEO, we find the SEO vendor. For you who are listening, if you're not like savvy with this stuff, find the vendor, find somebody like Poles Podcast that's already doing this stuff, and you don't have to sit on the

Creative Potential of AI

SPEAKER_00 29:28

sidelines of this AI impact that's happening for all kinds of processes, workflows, and businesses, you're not on the sidelines, you know, and it's not costing you $3,000 an episode. So, I mean, there's like I'm not gonna say there's no excuse, but there's really there's no there's no barrier anymore.

SPEAKER_01 29:46

And and the nice thing about the nice thing about podcasts is that even though even though you're scanning newsletters, you're picking up news, podcasts give you such an amazing amount of time with the people that care about your particular topic. I mean, even the people listening to this podcast right now, you you've already spent all these minutes just listening to what's happening in the industry and what's happening and how we can help you in AI. Uh, that that amount of time is an amazing investment from all the people that care deeply about uh about your particular business area. And all of a sudden you've got these people listening for more time than you could ever imagine paying for a television ad for 30 seconds. It's incredible. It's like that that value is unbelievable. And uh, as they're spending this time, inherently they are listening in, thinking, uh, even if they're not consciously thinking it, they're realizing that uh they're take taking in the news, they're they're gaining benefit from it, they get value from it. They have a positive intent towards that business that is providing this for them. Uh and and I think that's that's the great opportunity there. Podcasts are a slow burn. They take take time like newsletters, it takes a while to build up. Uh it takes a while to get an audience, it takes a while to get the hang of it and the right content and the right. It takes it and it takes time to that audience to find it. Uh, but that's that's uh that's I think I I think the I like it that way in terms of podcasts than something that was quick and flash and went away. Podcasts build up, but they tend to stick around and be and people care deeply about them and they come back to them even. They they roll off them and they get sidetracked on something else, and they come back a few months later. And I think that's the great thing about podcasts is that if you maintain that uh that relentlessness of producing podcasts, uh the audience really does stick around uh to hear what you have to say.

SPEAKER_00 31:25

So for the listeners, if you are thinking about, you've you thought about, hey, I'd really like to start getting a content strategy together, but I don't have time to write articles and blog posts and newsletters and record videos and podcasts. What you do is you start with one piece, uh one one one um output. And let's say it is the podcast. You don't have to now, now I gotta go write articles. Now I gotta go. No. The podcast with the tools that are available now with AI, that that one podcast, I think in the processes that we've got set up Ian, I record a process and with very little participation from humans outside of the um tweaking of some production, we're producing 120 platform-specific content pieces that are everything from text only, there's video, we're using all of the tools from one episode and it and in about 15 minutes. Now, we spent 90 days tweaking and building this and all this kind of stuff out. But now, if I needed to do that for somebody else, five minutes or you know, map it out for somebody else. Um now they'd still have to do the work, but so folks, there is so much leverage that comes from, and maybe you're like, uh, I'll do the electronic, I'll do the, I'll let the robot do my podcast, but I want to focus on the newsletter, or I want to focus on creating you know handy social spots. Anything that you're creating now has so much more mileage from it because of these tools like what Ian's talking about. So that's fantastic. You guys doing anything with video that's interesting?

SPEAKER_01 33:03

No, not yet. That's the next uh next opportunity, I think, uh, as we're starting to explore some of the uh the new opportunities with video to take uh avatars and uh

Future of AI in Video

SPEAKER_01 33:12

to voice them, give them uh it I can't I think we're starting, we're just on the edge of that now, so I think that's very exciting. So being able to uh and we've we've been asked a couple of times. I don't I don't think uh our exploration of technology, I think we're just on that edge of starting to say, okay, maybe maybe we're at a point where we can start having a play with this now. Uh and again, it's one of those things where video, also very expensive to do, very expensive to do, uh edit it to get that right, to uh have colour balance, like all the stuff you need to do to make videos look professional, is really hard work and really time consuming. Uh and and and incredibly expensive. If you could do that in an automated fashion and have someone that uh uh looks, looks great, sounds great, speaks my message in the way that I care about, that would be amazing. And I think there's a there's a bunch of stuff out there right now that is very close to being uh at the point where we can start to take that and do something exciting with it. And I think that that'll be the next step. We do a we do a little uh uh little podcast as a an example of using AI to it's called Wake Up Sydney. So uh each morning we we grab the weather, we grab the the train uh information that's happening in the city of Sydney uh and what's happening in the on the roads, and we grab grab those from the government websites, we we take get the AI to turn that into a three to five minute little podcast every morning. And that's uh and uh it's and we give it a we give a kind of comedic uh twist to it. So he's uh the the the the kind of pretend voiceover artist on on here, it's it's Nay, obviously, is uh it's very funny. The the script is great, it's it's actually quite hilarious. I find myself quite often laughing to the jokes, it's it's very funny. Uh we've we've often listened to that and gone, you know what, this would be great as a video, as a little TikTok, you know, kind of video stream in the morning. That would be uh fantastic. Just just three minutes gives you what's happening and and you just jokes about Sydney and the roads and the trend, what's happening. Uh and it's uh if you could turn that into a video, that's okay. So that's something we want to explore next. I think that we if we can get that into a video format, that would be that would be great.

SPEAKER_00 35:14

Well, we're working on that, buddy. So when we crack the code, I'll let you know on that one. Please, yeah, get in touch. Get in touch, mate. So for the listeners, this is interesting because the first thing that I'm thinking about as a a business person is advertising. Oh my gosh, I've got all these people listening to Wake Up Sydney. You know, it's fun, you know, it's a fun little uh thing to do on the side, but wait a minute, I could actually sell you know local advertising spots in that three to five minute and wait a minute, and that took me how much time to do on a daily basis? Because I'm sure with if you want to get technical, you could get somebody to set up an RSS speed that ran into your GPT and that. So uh, you know, like folks, there's there's no limitation. If you could think about this idea, I mean I think about AI all day long, but I've never thought about doing exactly what Ian just said. It's limitless. The the only uh impediments to what's possible with generative AI is how you're thinking about it. How clever, how creative can you be? You listen to these podcasts, you hear people like Ian, right? And now, bing, oh, I remember that one episode. We could do this like this, you're learning right now. You are becoming uh AI capable just from listening to this podcast. It's fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 36:31

I think that I think that's a great point though. And what I've loved about your podcast is that you really are inspiring people to be creative and take these tools and imagine what can they, what can you do, what could you do with this? This is amazing. Okay, if I can do this, how does that apply to what matters to me? And that that sense of being creative, uh, I think is a very inspiring for people that are listening for sure.

SPEAKER_00 36:53

You know, and and if you think about it, so people, there's fear about how is AI gonna impact my career, my industry? Am I gonna have to upskill? Am I gonna lose my job? And you know, that was the initial phase. And then it got into this phase of AI is not gonna take your job. Someone who knows AI is gonna take your job. And as a professional, both of us working with AI, you get it. If there's two resumes and this person's like, well, I've been, you know, using these AI-related tools, all things being equal, if this if one of those candidates has this advantage, maybe they won't get the job, but I'm gonna start there because I understand they're gonna be able to get done way more work or maybe way way more production at a higher quality and faster than the un-AI enabled, I guess would be the AI illiterate or whatever the sorry guys, if you're AI illiterate, I'm not no, no, you're you're you're absolutely right, Chris.

SPEAKER_01 37:50

I I really see AI as a force multiplier, right? So you put some effort into something and you get a result. With AI, I can put some effort into something and get a much bigger, better, extensive result than I could before. So it really just enables me to do more with less money than I could possibly previously. Uh and so as a force multiplier, it's it's just a great tool. Uh, and like with most technology, you know, it can be good, it can be bad. We can use it for good things, we can use it for bad things. But it really is just a force multiplier. So I can get more done with less using these tools. Uh so it's important that if if I want to be more efficient with our with my business, who doesn't want to be more efficient with their business? Who doesn't want to do more? Uh it wasn't who doesn't want to have more time to concentrate on the actual at the act of running a business as opposed to all the marketing and all the other stuff, then why wouldn't I use a tool that enables me to do a better job in less time and give me more time to be great at the thing that if I went into business, it's the thing that I'm great at that I wanted to do the business about. It gives me more time to do that. Fantastic. And I can get a better result. It'd be crazy not to give it a go.

SPEAKER_00 38:54

You know, and uh if if you're if you're listening to this and you're like, well, you know, I don't have time to learn a new tool, or I'm not techie, or whatever the case might be. It's not about that. That the tools themselves aren't they don't have a big learning curve. Despite the power of the technology, it does not have a big learning curve. The learning curve or the the real is you as the human input creative you know device. That's that's the hard part. So if you're listening to this and you're like, wow, we hear all these uh, you know, doing it in Spanish and all this, don't worry about it. Those once you know how to use the tools, it's very easy. But if you don't, if you're not thinking, oh, wait a minute, we can do this in five different languages. If you're not having that process, you're not the tool's waiting there to give you that, right? You need to learn that part of it, that that like well now. Like, like what's possible, right? And I hope that you know, hearing Ian's example of going from two to three thousand dollars for a half hour episode taking

Accessibility and Ease of Use

SPEAKER_00 40:04

eight to nine hours of professionals time down to hey, you're already doing a newsletter, send it over to us. Now you get a podcast, right? Like for a couple hundred bucks or whatever the price is. That's that's that could be your start, right? Into AI as a the listeners. If you're not ready to start watching a bunch of YouTube videos or enroll in a course or whatever, that's okay. Getting started with working with somebody who comes onto this podcast and educates and that sort of thing, you're still leveraging AI, but it's not up to you on a pass bail situation. You're handing it off to somebody who's like, oh, we do this 10 times a day.

SPEAKER_01 40:44

Absolutely. And I think that that just getting into it enables you to go, okay, so this is how this is done. This gives me this opportunity. And and again, in to your point about being creative, I think that that it just frees you up to be more creative in other areas and give you more opportunities to think about how you can do this. And I think one of the, and I'm sure you've uh I'm sure you've talked about this on other podcasts, the the joy of uh these new AI systems is that unlike in the past, where I mean, I have a technology background, so you know I've been trying to tell computers to do things for a while, uh you speak of special code to talk to computers. Uh, and it, you know, you've got to learn the code and you've got to make sure that it does exactly the right thing, otherwise it does exactly the wrong thing. Uh and for for normal humans, this is this is uh a very it's a very it's a foreign language, even even for for normal for coding humans, I guess. But now these AIs, the way you make them do things is you talk to them in language, normal language. This is phenomenal. You talk to it like, yeah, you uh I want you to act like a creative writer, and I want you to write a podcast, and I want you to give it uh a sense of a serious business tone because this is a serious topic. And here's the things that I want you to talk about, and I want you to link these things together uh in a way that uh uh makes sense and flows nicely. Uh, and I want you to give it a sense of uh optimism at the end as we look at the industry and where this is going. Uh, and this is the episode for uh today's date, and uh amazing that we can now be programming these AIs in a language that we understand finally, not that they understand, but we uh Isn't this amazing? This is this is a phenomenal step that I don't think everyone's talking about enough. Is that we we've we've we've removed that barrier now between having these magical special technology people, I count myself as one of these magical special technology, you don't need me anymore. You can talk to the AI in a language you under this is fantastic. Oh amazing! Amazing. That the accessibility that this gives to everybody to this incredible technology is huge, huge.

SPEAKER_00 42:42

You know, I I don't know if it was GitHub, it was some like some place at a repository that had a reputation of being for techies, right? But they're now doing a natural language, and I don't know that it was GitHub, but it was something like that. They're now doing that natural language coding environment in their their spot to where their position is we want to create two billion new coders. And you're thinking, oh my gosh, that's but they're not they're not teaching you coding, they're doing exactly what you just said, they're teaching you how, they're not even teaching you, they're just letting you, allowing you to interact with all of that technology, but through a filter of casual conversation. It's like all of us can now be programmers.

SPEAKER_01 43:23

Exactly. The possibilities are amazing. So I think that's I think it's truly exciting. The the opportunity to re to re reach a niche at a at a cost-effective way, whatever that, whatever that might be, the the ability to reach these new technologies using our natural language that we are speaking today in the same way that you would talk to a human to do something. Uh the the I mean, I I'm I'm pretty excited about what's going to happen, happen next, Chris, in terms of where are we going with this in the in the industry? Where's where's what technologies will come out next? How can we use this to do new things we haven't even thought of yet? Uh I think is I think is we're in a very exciting time.

SPEAKER_00 43:58

Yeah, for sure. Hey, so so Ian, if people are interested, they say, hey, look, I want to find out. I'm I'm doing a newsletter. How how can I turn it into a podcast? What do they need to do to find out more from what you guys are?

SPEAKER_01 44:08

Yeah, if you want to hop onto our uh website, www.pulsepodcasts.com. Uh we've got some sample podcasts there you can have and listen to. Uh, if you're not blown away by the call of the podcast, I'd be surprised. They are, uh, if I do say so myself, they really do sound quite amazing. Uh and Wake Up City is very funny, so just have a listen to that for five minutes. It's great. Uh and um uh we we we do some human podcasts as well, so you can see how we do that too. But but the the real interest there is in in terms of uh doing AI generation from

Closing Remarks

SPEAKER_01 44:37

from scratch. Uh and you know, pop in a pop in a note in the contact form and we'll we'll get back to you and send us send us a copy of your newsletter, we'll turn it into a podcast for you, and you can have a listen. And uh we're doing this for some local councils and cities uh in Australia and the US. Um and to be honest, they they are telling each other now about these uh they're like, oh, we'd love to have a podcast. We don't have the time, money, energy, blah, blah, blah. Same same story. Uh this is great. It sounds amazing, and and it just pops out. This is this is exactly what I so we'd we'd really recommend that you give it a crack and we'd happily do you want doing do you want for free, just see how it sounds like, and uh and if you like it, then we can keep doing it for you.

SPEAKER_00 45:14

There's no barriers anymore, people. Reach out to Ian. We're gonna have the link obviously in the show notes. But Ian, are there any social platforms that you tend to uh we can find you on in particular where you spend time?

SPEAKER_01 45:26

Yeah, if you can you can find us on LinkedIn, you can find us on uh on uh Facebook, you can find us on uh I think we do have uh we don't we don't quite get back to Instagram or those other ones yet, but we're we're about to start looking at TikTok to see if we can uh generate some. We haven't quite got the the speaking person yet, but China generated videos with with the actual uh audio. Uh so we're looking at that next. So so keep uh keep checking back and we'll see if we can get some links in there about uh about TikTok as well.

SPEAKER_00 45:53

Very cool. Well, Ian, thank you so much. I uh I'm fascinated by what you guys are able to do with the push of a button. It's pretty incredible. So everybody, thank you so much for listening. Join us next week and we'll be teaching you more about how to use AI at work. Thanks for tuning in to using AI at work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work. And a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer, for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for a free AI readiness assessment and AI strategy guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chiefaiofficer.com. Special thanks to our producer, Evan Desalnier, for making this episode possible. Follow us on Twitter at the handle UsingAI at work and visit www.usingaiatwork.com for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.