Podcasting 101, Blubrry’s Podcast AI Assistant – PCI 388

[Todd Cochrane]:\nBut here's the beauty about this for those of you that are dashboard customers. All of this data, the show narrative, the episode title, the episode art that you choose, and the episode chapter files is already put into a draft episode. In the draft episode, also linked is your media file, is also linked to transcript. All this stuff is going to be preset so that when you go in and edit in the dashboard, all this information is there and ready for you. It's in draft mode. So you go in there and fix it up, put your images in, do whatever additional editing you want. We've made it very, very fast for you to edit. \n\n[Mike Dell]:\nYou're listening to Podcast Insider hosted by Mike Dell, Todd Cochran, and Mackenzie Bennett from the Blueberry team, bringing you weekly insights, advice, and insider tips and tricks to help you start, grow, and thrive through podcasting. With all the support of your team here at Blueberry Podcasting. Welcome. Let's dive in. Hello. I'm Mike Dell, VP of customer relations here at Blueberry. \n\n[Todd Cochrane]:\nAnd this is Todd Cochran, CEO and cofounder of Blueberry. \n\n[Mike Dell]:\nAnd last week, we talked about the Thrive plan here at Blueberry. And now the rest of the story. \n\n[Todd Cochrane]:\nYou know, Mike, I hinted and I talked a little bit, I guess, for a better word, teased what we've got coming with our podcast AI platform. And, I I'm really, you know, having used this now for just about, well, probably five weeks in beta and a couple of weeks in internal administrative testing. I'm I'm I'm really, really jazzed with what, we have and and what this new AI tool is gonna mean for our podcasters. You know, one one of the things that has always drove me I'll I'll be frank for those of you listening. Drove me nuts is you guys don't write good show notes. \n\n[Mike Dell]:\nYeah. Show show notes are a weakness for sure, you know, amongst a lot of podcasters. \n\n[Todd Cochrane]:\nSome people get it really right, and some people get it really bad. And the way I look at this is that you are creating this great audio content. I mean, it's the the content's fabulous. And then you you put it out there and you give nothing to Google to chew on. You give them no metadata. You don't give them you don't you don't give your episode a chance to be found, and be indexed and to be discovered. And one of the goals that I had in designing this in in in just as a little pre background, I used a whole bunch of different tools. I mean, a a a a plethora of tools to do what we have built internally in one product to be able to get the same results. And it was and it really added this huge amount of workflow to my podcast. It made my podcast show notes better. It did made the the metadata better. It did it did a lot of things, but it what it really didn't do was save me time. And now with the with the process that we put in place, I really feel this is gonna give all of you some creative outputs that you've never had before. And, again, I I do wanna start off by saying though too that nothing is going to replace you as a as the voice of your shows. We're providing you tools to help you become more creative and maybe ask better questions and come up with a variety of different topics. And at the same time, given the allowances within the platform to to let you have your own input. \n\n[Mike Dell]:\nWhat I found really nice about it, my own shows that I've tested with is it motivates me. The preshow planning part really motivates me to have a little bit more of a plan when I start, you know, when I hit record. I have a little bit more of a plan. I don't follow it to the tee. I don't read anything. I just, you know, I just have it as as, you know, kind of a guide of how to how to do it. And then afterwards, you know, I'm terrible at show notes. I just am. And what I like about this is it it writes a whole bunch of stuff. You could pick and choose and edit and all this, but it saves you a whole lot of time trying to think what you wanna write. Right. Right. You know, that's that's where I find it a value, for me. And, you know, every everybody's mileage will vary, but, you know, I think this is a really good tool, so far in my testing. And I didn't test all this stuff, as you pointed out to me just before we hit record. But, yeah, it's, it's quite the it it wraps up a lot of the tools that we've been playing with. Yeah. \n\n[Todd Cochrane]:\nSo let let me talk just a little bit about the process, number one. And the process really starts off that you get into the platform, and we give you the opportunity to create what is essentially called a show profile. And it's the first thing you have to implement. And we'll have full documentation when the platform launches and you'll be able to go through it. So basically, the host names again, if you have more than one host or two or three or four, five, you can put their profiles in for each host, their bios. If you have cohosts, you can add those to the show profile. Then you can set up a bunch of demographic data. What is the desired audience? What is the desired, identity? Male, female, non very? What is the what is the desired level of education, employment status, household, single, married, with children without your income? Because some shows are really, you know, if if you're a lady and you are doing a a a show that is directed towards women, you want the outputs that we're going to be given to you targeted towards those demographics. We don't use all the data currently that you fill out in the show profile in part of the AI stuff, but as as time progresses and this thing gets more smarter, we'll incorporate more of these, these settings that we're having you set up now. And then the most important thing is really two things. Well, what is the most important stuff in this profile is the host and their bios, the cohost and their bios, the podcast goal. What is the goal of the podcast? And the description of the show, what is your podcast show's description. And once you've got all that done and you save that show profile, you're then ready to do episode planning. Now my gut tells me that more of you are going to use our post show processing tool than you will use the pre show planning tool. For me, personally, I have someone that does show prep for my tech show, and I don't necessarily need the show planning section. But, Mike, you've been using the show planning section because you've been prepping for this show by putting topics and the things that we wanna discuss in this podcast and who's gonna be in it, and it's been able to create topic suggestions. Well, what happens is when you start a new episode planning, there's a white box that says episode plan, and you put in your episode topic. You put the sources. Maybe you've got five, six, seven, or five or six links to content that you're gonna talk about. We have you add some keywords, focus keywords that should be focused around what this episode's description is, And then we have the ability to to add your guest if you have a guest. And, again, giving that guest bio, maybe a link over to LinkedIn. And with that data, when you save that plan, what happens then is we take the combine information from the show profile and your episode plan, and then we generate a list of episode topics. We give the ability to pick. We we suggest ten topics for the show. You have the ability to add as many topics as you want manually or edit the topics that we have suggested. Mhmm. Once you save those, it then kinda looks at your guest profile, looks at the other information in the planning document, and then it gives you the questions that would be appropriate for your guest based upon the goal of the show that your guest, his bio or her bio. And then that comes up with a list of ten questions that would be questions for your guest. And you have the ability again to add your own questions. And when that's all done, when you get those episode topics, guest questions, you've got your plan goals, all this stuff, then we actually create a Showflow document. And the Showflow document is is really designed for you to be to copy it, to edit it, to make it flow the way you want, but we lay all this information out in basically a show flow. And you can use this or pump it into the current document that you're using now for your for your show. Maybe you don't have anything. Maybe just take this and print it and then say, okay. This is we're gonna do this, this, and this. We're not gonna do this. We're not gonna do this. But it really gives you the ability to have a show flow. And why, Mike, do you think I say a show flow that is cohesive each time is important? \n\n[Mike Dell]:\nYeah. Well, you know, the format of a show, people get used to that. So Right. If you have a certain format that you run, you know, just having it being consistent, you know, regardless of the topics Yep. It's really helpful. You know, part of this when I was doing mine for my personal show, you know, I generally don't have a specific topic. And so I want to talk about this and this and this and this, And I threw it in there, and it really, you know, made it so that I wasn't bouncing from topic to topic. So yeah. Because I don't have a consistent flow. But, you know, in in the other show I do with a co host, we do have a pretty consistent flow. And this show, of course, we have a pretty consistent flow, and it just helps organize your thoughts while you're recording. You know, you read that ahead of time or you you look at it while you're while you're recording, and it really does help. You know, the part that I never used was the, guest question. So I I sort of missed that it even existed. So because I don't have guests usually. Right. You know? And and the more you tweak that show profile, the better it's gonna align with, what your show is like. \n\n[Todd Cochrane]:\nYeah. So the episode planning piece from start to finish, probably ten minutes. Yeah. If you really write a good this is description of what my show's gonna be about. These are the some of the source material I'm gonna be using as reference points, the keywords, making sure you're getting your guest information in there. If you do that, this this five to ten minutes of episode planning will give you a consistent output that you can rinse, wash, repeat for every episode that you do. Mhmm. Now, again, I don't use the episode planning part as much as I do the episode post production. And this tool, oh, allows you to move to the next step or start from scratch to help you produce when I'm calling it SEO enhanced show titles and corresponding comprehensive show notes. And it's it's it's amazing. You can pick from a production that you've already done, and you basically, from that standpoint, it will know who is on the show. It'll know that Todd and Mike were on this episode. It will know what the show content was about. You can tweak that a little bit in the settings before you go into full production, but it's designed to basically, at this point, have the ability to go ahead and upload your media. And this is an important part of this step. This is the part where the system is gonna help you out a great deal. It uploads your media, and if you're hosting, on PowerPress or if you got a PowerPress site and you're hosting with us or you're if you're a dashboard user, all the features for the uploader are still there. You can still send the file off for media mastering. Once it's done uploading, it will go into your bucket and be available for publishing on your normal, publishing production flow. But the most important thing is the the what this then does is it creates a transcript. And this transcript is, what's the word I'm looking for here? Basically, it detects the speakers. It'll say speaker one, speaker two, speaker three, and then you have a drop down to be able to pick Todd, Mike. Because you can see the transcript and see who speaker one, and then you associate who speaker one, speaker two is. And once you do that, once you designate who the speakers are and say, okay. I'm done, ultimately you'll be provided a a text file, an SRT, or a VTT to be able to download right from within the production system. And, also, those files are sent over into your bucket if you're, a Blueberry podcast hosting customer that for your, to attach the it'll automatically be attached in the dashboard, \n\n[Mike Dell]:\nfor your in, in PowerPress, you know, just or download the file, tweak it Yep. And then upload it, whatever you'd like to do. But what's what I really like about that is, you know, you can do the VTT format, which is Apple's native format now that they're doing transcripts. That just came out, by the way. It's kinda cool, as we're recording this. But, you know, it's like when I'm watching the closed captioning on Apple Podcasts or on our player, it says Todd's talking in the Right. You know, and it shows what you're talking. Then when I start talking, it'll say Mike's talking or, you know, Mike or whatever. And, you know, it's just a much richer experience than just a blob of text rolling. That's right. \n\n[Todd Cochrane]:\nAnd once the once you've designated who the speakers are in the transcript, then the system will generate ten episode titles. Now what I'm doing is this thing would take fifteen, twenty seconds to generate the titles, maybe a little longer, maybe thirty seconds. I'm thinking in my head, what is the title of this episode that I most and then what I do is I compare. I compare the episode titles. And in probably seventy five percent of the time, I will take the title that the AI has provided over one that I've had in my head. Now I like it seven out of ten times out or three out of the ten times, I'll say, I like my title better, and I'll add my own title. But seven out of ten times, I've taken the suggested title, or I can edit the suggested title right in the system. Once I've chosen the title for the episode, then the system goes in and creates a show narrative. And this this is where this thing gets absolutely beautiful. Number one, it produces a narrative. And these narratives from from my perspective so far, I've had to do minimal editing, maybe three minutes of editing on the show narrative. It also provides me bullet points. So if you are like to have your show notes in bullet points, you can take the bullet points. So you've got a show narrative, you've got bullet points, and then you have the ability to create episode art. Now you you have the option whether or not to have it try to provide text or not. But what we've done is we've given you the ability to get two pieces of episode art. You don't get to regenerate. You only get two. And if you don't like what it's produced, then you have to kinda go figure out what you want on your own. But, Mike, in your experience on the episode art, how many of those have you used or went and tried to generate a new one? I've used all but one. \n\n[Mike Dell]:\nFor one of you know, I've probably put out four episodes using this. Yeah. And I've used the episode art, three times \n\n[Todd Cochrane]:\nout of four episodes. Yeah. So I probably done a dozen post productions, and I'll say that I probably used the art ten times. So, again, this is not perfect, and we do limit you on a monthly basis on how many images you can create. So, currently, we have the images set at ten. This is the most expensive part of us of this generation process is doing the art. So we do limit you to, I think, the ten pieces of art a month. But, again, if you don't like what this has come up with, take the show narrative and just go over to chat g p t and ask it to create a an image for you. Yeah. But, again, the episode art, I think, over time will get better. And as it gets cheaper, we'll give we'll give you more options. But, no. I've been very, very, very happy with this. Now Impressed. Yes. Me too. Totally. But, you know, the thing that I never have time for, Mike, and I know you don't have time for it either Oh, never. Is \n\n[Mike Dell]:\nis chapters. Right? Yeah. Chapters because, you know, it what's cool about chapters is with our player and and a lot of the podcast two point o type apps, the chapters are right there in the player. What is and what's really neat, you know, is you can list them out and you say, oh, well, I wanna hear this interview with so and so that's in chapter three. You could just hit that and listen to that, you know, kinda like our old skip to that we used to have in, within PowerPress. And that still works too, by the way. But, this is chapters that are, you know, it comes as a JSON file, and we store that right here at Blueberry for you so you don't have to worry about, you know, weird compatibilities with WordPress and all that stuff. But what's nice about it is you don't have to do it. You can go back in there later and put images and links and whatever else or and you can even edit the chapters if you think that there's one that doesn't need to be there. You could just take it out and, you know, whatever. So but we get we can at least get the ball rolling, so it's not gonna take you two hours to do chapters. \n\n[Todd Cochrane]:\nSo some of you may not even know what a chapter is. I've never heard of it. So what a chapter file is, in in a technical sense is a media file with a dot JSON. You're like, what is that? JSON. You maybe have heard that word. But what it is is basically, some metadata that has time hacks in it along with a title. So in other words, like, one minute and fifteen seconds into one of my episode, I had my sponsor message and listener shout out. So I would and and what the AI did is it created a a time hack, a chapter file at one minute and fifteen seconds. Maybe I don't want that as my chapter file. Maybe I don't want that in my chapter files. I can delete it or I can add a URL to my sponsor and I can use add an image. And again, what happens in the player now, our new Blueberry player that we've updated several weeks ago, is you will actually see along the timeline hash marks. And these chapters from the AI tie directly into that, And, basically, you have the ability to modify and edit it, and it doesn't carry through to some of the, like, Spotify. They don't support any of this, but a lot of the new podcast apps that Mike's was re referring to at podcast apps dot com actually have full support for this. So the listener experience is much, much better. And within the actual, episode chapter generator, we've got a player there. You can play your audio if you think a chapter is missing. Again, you can come back and update this later. But here's the beauty about this for those of you that are dashboard customers. All of this data, the show narrative, the episode title, the episode art that you choose, and the episode chapter files is already put into a draft episode. In the draft episode, also linked is your media file, is also linked to transcript. All this stuff is going to be preset so that when you go in and edit in the dashboard, all this information is there and ready for you. It's in draft mode. So you go in there and fix it up, put your images in, do whatever additional editing you want. We've made it very, very fast for you to edit. Now those of you that are on PowerPress, you're gonna have to cut and paste that title, the narrative, the the chapters link into your PowerPress production. But, again, this just makes it so super fast. At some point, someday, we might be able to get this where we have WordPress go into a draft mode and have an episode ready for you on PowerPress too. But, that opens up some stuff that we don't necessarily want to open up on WordPress at this point because of, you know, what I would consider to be a security issue. We'd have to do this via API to make it secure. But in the end, my output product just in the episode production is ten times better. Yeah. Post post production, \n\n[Mike Dell]:\nyou know, it's it's just a lot more useful for Google for one thing. Sure. And for your listener, you know, you you say, hey. It's covered over here in the show notes, and it is covered. You know? That's that's the the magic of this is it it changes how you do your pro you know, like I said, I I've I've actually recorded episodes, and then I'm thinking, oh, I gotta write show notes. And then I've actually delayed episodes because I didn't feel like writing the show notes. So now this gives me a kick start. Yeah. It it it really does. And that's that's the best part about this that I've Now \n\n[Todd Cochrane]:\nwe've got some partners that help you with social promotion and all that kind of stuff, and, nothing taken away from those platforms. But we really got to the point where, let's help you some more. So we have a social content production portion as well, And it it it does the same thing. It works from, either pre pros you can come in here raw and not have done anything and just start a new production as well or choose from one of the ones that you've already worked with. And what ultimately happens is is it again, it looks at the transcript, and from the transcript then it derives on its own five segments in your content that it feels are great social moments. And then this is a product that will probably improve over time based upon feedback, but we give you the captions. We give you the Instagram x, LinkedIn, Facebook captions. Now we don't create a post for you, but we create the caption for you. This is a caption creator. As an example, here's one of the Instagram captions it created for, one of my shows. It says, Hertz takes a detour from its EV fleet dreams, but what does this mean for the future of electric vehicles? Tune in to the latest Geek News Central podcast episode to find out. Hashtag Hertz, hashtag electric vehicles, hashtag tech news, hashtag podcasts. Yeah. And then here's another one. Here's another, social clip. Are you keeping your Windows security up to date? Don't let the Trojan horse in. Discover central tech updates on Geek News Central. Then it again, we give you the captions to share across different platforms. And, what we are finding here is this is just a, I guess, for a better word, a quick and dirty way to be able to get some real quick stuff scheduled on Instagram x, LinkedIn, or Facebook. You provide your own graphic, and you provide your own link, if allowed, back to your episode. But this is just one little piece of this platform that will design, again, designed to save you some time. And, \n\n[Mike Dell]:\nOf course, we know a lot of you guys have email lists. Yeah. And you wanna promote your episode there. We have the the tool there that will write an email for you or, you know, at least give you a good start on what you should put in your your email promotion to your list. And that's Let me just write in the script. Read a little sample \n\n[Todd Cochrane]:\nof what it put out for my email promo for this episode. It said, subject, a little car emoji, Hertz EV fleet reversal essential tech tips slash geekiness central podcast number seventeen twenty. And it starts off says, dear listeners, rev your engines and charge your devices because Geek News Central's latest episode titled Hertz EV Fleet Reversal Central Tech Update is an electrifying blend of tech news and industry insights. And then it does a quick overview of my show. There's how many paragraph there's, one, two, three, four, five, about six paragraphs, about a minute read. And then you can copy and paste this right into and make a little edit wherever you need, delete stuff you want, add stuff, and cut this right into your mailing list software. And bam, you've got an email promo from the last episode all ready to rock and roll, with you. Again, a little social content clips and an email promo in our social content production, but there's going to be more. Mike, you wanna talk a little bit about what we saw at the demo yesterday? \n\n[Mike Dell]:\nYeah. We're gonna be, doing some highlight clips, and we may or may not, it's how I'll put it, may or may not, produce some sort of video element for you to put on the various video platforms, or social platforms. It, it's slick. It's pretty ambitious if you ask me. So I think it I think it'll turn out nice. But the the the nice thing about it is, hey. You use that along with the, social content, \n\n[Todd Cochrane]:\nand, you know, you got a winner. Now you got a winner winner chicken dinner. And we've made this to really operate in a very cohesive, clean, fast way. And I'm gonna be I'm just gonna say it. I I I the team is, in my opinion, and when all of you see this, I think we've knocked this thing completely out of the ballpark. And here's the beauty. It's just ten dollar add on for Thryv, and you get all the stuff we talked about in Thryv on the last the last episode. \n\n[Mike Dell]:\nYeah. There there's nobody right now doing this for this price. And No. You know, we're not trying to compete on price. We're not trying to compete on features. But, you know, the the beauty of it is is it's easy and it's all in one place. \n\n[Todd Cochrane]:\nI I had a dozen companies, dev a dozen podcast companies, podcast AI companies Yeah. We've been on those meetings. We've been on those meetings. \n\n[Mike Dell]:\nI I I've been on a few of those myself and, you know, yeah, their stuff is great, but it's really expensive and it's external to your normal flow. So it isn't gonna save you time. \n\n[Todd Cochrane]:\nWhere I don't even consider it that great. Well, some of them are good. But but I'll be honest with you. What we have done here is for ten bucks additional, we're getting you nine a ninety percent solution. Now here's the thing. We've we've got a partnership with, Descript, Headliner. Those are all great tools in their own rights. Don't get us wrong. They do great things. Those are dedicated tools, but I believe what we're creating gets you to the ninety percent mark for headliner. It probably does not do what Descript does because Descript does audio editing. Editor too. Yes. Yeah. That's a different and we have not decided to do, AI editing yet. I know some folks have focused on that, but we got other companies that have are doing this at a much better level. And plus, many of you are using your own tools. You're using Hindenburg. You're using Adobe edition. You're using Descript. You're using Audacity. You're you're already very familiar in your audio editing platforms. Why do I need to come in? We're already providing the media mastering tool, which is just exceptional to do the final touch up to your to your, edited content. So these four pieces, three of which will be launching directly and the fourth with the highlight clip creation coming next, again, included as part of the thrive plan, I think, I think this is just gonna be an absolute freaking home run. And we've got more planned. More planned on in stats and in on the actual platform. \n\n[Mike Dell]:\nAnd, of course, we're always open to per improvements too. You find something in there that, you you think we should tweak. You know, this that's we're we're building this modularly. I guess that's a word in it. Yeah. So that things can be switched in and out if need be or improved or we and all that. \n\n[Todd Cochrane]:\nWay we build it is is that if some new model comes out that's a lot better Mhmm. We'll we have the ability to switch models, pretty much on the fly. We'd obviously do the, you know, some testing before we switch to a new model to make sure the outputs were still looking good, but we didn't lock ourselves into one platform. Now one thing you I'll just say as a caution. We I've yet to see it, but the the AI can produce stuff that maybe wasn't in your podcast. I'm not saying that that is gonna be the case here, but this is the caution in when you do anything in AI at this point, you need to QA the titles. You need to QA the summary. You need the quality assurance. Everything that you're going to put publicly on your website to make sure that it is what was in your content, that this thing hasn't drifted and said something or created something that wasn't true. So always QA any of the outputs. We definitely want feedback if you see outputs that are, you know, questionable because that'll give us the opportunity to go in and look at your production plan and see what happened and tweak things on our side. But the Blueberry team has really thought this went through in a in a big, big way. I I'm as excited about this as any product that we've ever launched. \n\n[Mike Dell]:\nYeah. It's, it's definitely gonna be a game changer for for those of us lazy podcasters. You know? It's because the quality of the of the the audio, the content is one thing. You know, we're we're all pretty good at that. At least we think we are. But this takes it all to the next level with the written content and and all of that and images. You know, I never used to do episode images. And now with this, you know, I've got a better chance of wanting to do that. And maybe somebody that, you know, that doesn't really wanna spend three hours in postproduction. \n\n[Todd Cochrane]:\nYeah. And maybe the episode planning is your weakness. Maybe you need creative help. And I think for some people, they get stuck and they're like, oh, what am I gonna talk about today? And I got an idea, but maybe I'm having a hard time formulating what I should talk about around that idea. And this is where the episode planning piece can come in and say, alright. I I wanna do a show on, let's say, this topic. And I have some general ideas, and you can put the overarching topic for the episode and some rendering thoughts of ideas. It doesn't have to be like this concisely written out plan. It it can be a like Mike said, you put four or five things into your episode topic planning, and then it just spit out stuff, ideas that you're like, woah. \n\n[Mike Dell]:\nYeah. They didn't think about talking about that. \n\n[Todd Cochrane]:\nRight. They gave you ten topics. And out of those ten topics, how many of those did you pick? \n\n[Mike Dell]:\nThree. But still, you know, that would have been one more than I would have normally done, you know, on that particular episode. So Yeah. You know, it just it it gives you extra things to think about. And it actually some of the other topics gave me ideas for future episodes. \n\n[Todd Cochrane]:\nThat's interesting. All these are stored. All those topics that we that you don't pick are still in the topic planner, so you can go back and look at those later. We don't erase those. And we do give you the ability to regenerate topics. You say, okay. It gave me two good topics. I'd like some more. Are you able to regenerate and get a few more? So I know some folks also are going to be a little AI shy, and all I can say is give this thing a shot. We're gonna give each of you, doesn't matter if you're on Thrive or not. We're gonna give you five trials of each of the AI features. We're gonna give you five episode planning, five episode podcast productions, and five social promotion, productions. So, basically, you get to use this fifteen times, five in each section, to come up with a decision whether or not we've delivered something for you that is worth ten dollars a month and all the other stuff you get with Thrive as well. \n\n[Mike Dell]:\nYep. You guys covered that last week. So, yeah, I think we've got this covered, and, it'll be out soon with big air Soon. \n\n[Todd Cochrane]:\nWe'll have some videos for you guys to check out so you get a quick overview before this thing's fully on the street. That's the goal. \n\n[Mike Dell]:\nYes. Thanks for joining us. Come back next week. And in the meantime, head to podcast insider dot com for more information, to subscribe, share, and read our show notes. To check out our latest suite of services and learn how Blueberry can help you leverage your podcast. Visit blueberry dot com. That's Blueberry without the e's. We couldn't afford the e's. \n\n