In this episode, Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson discuss the evolving landscape of podcast consumption, particularly in light of Satya Nadella’s innovative approach to engaging with audio content through AI. They explore the significance of transcripts, the potential for AI to facilitate interactive experiences, and the challenges that come with adopting these new technologies. The conversation highlights the future of podcasts as a medium that can be both passive and interactive, reshaping how audiences engage with audio content. Neville and Shel also examine how these same generative AI tools can make other content interactive and the ease with which users will be able to take advantage of it as LLMs become multi-modal.

Links from this episode

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 24.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz (00:03.168)

@nevillehobson (00:10.742)

@nevillehobson (00:38.72)

His comment was, there’s no going back. This shines a spotlight on a crucial, but sometimes overlooked asset for podcasters, the transcript. Providing a transcript isn’t just about accessibility, although that’s a critical benefit. It’s also about discoverability, repurposing, and now enabling new ways of engaging with content. Transcripts can enable a number of things, such as improving SEO, helping your podcast get found in search.

makes your content more accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, enable content repurposing into blog posts, social media or newsletters, and as Nadella demonstrates, allow AI tools to analyze, summarize or even hold conversations about your content. In a world where attention is scarce, transcripts are no longer just a nice to have, they’re becoming essential infrastructure for how audiences, including high level business leaders, interact with audio content.

So here’s the primary discussion point for our conversation today. Could Satya Nadella’s model be the future for busy professionals where AI acts as a bridge between long form audio and actionable insights? And if so, what does that mean for podcasts and communicators in how we produce a packaged content? What do you think, Cheryl?

Shel Holtz (02:23.167)

And a lot of people don’t want to work in their car. They’re driving, they’re relaxing. Asking questions is not on their bingo card for their for their drive to or from work, for example, or or during a road trip. So I think people will continue to take the easy road for the most part. But for people who are trying to learn a lot or glean information.

related to current events or emerging science or whatever the theme of the podcast they listen to is. Yeah, absolutely. I think this is going to be a popular approach and there are more than one way to do it. For example, you could put that transcript into Google’s Notebook LM. I don’t think you can talk to it yet, but you can. can you? OK, great. Well, there you go.

@nevillehobson (03:40.267)

Shel Holtz (03:49.226)

Yeah, exactly. But if the transcript has been loaded into the notebook, then the conversation, obviously, you can listen to the podcast with the two hosts talking about it. But at that point, you might as well just listen to a podcast, one or the other listen to the original. But the whole idea of Notebook LM, even before they introduced that podcast feature, was your ability to query the notebook based on everything that’s in it. You could have 50 episodes of a podcast or you could load

the transcripts of the most recent episodes of 20 different podcasts on the same theme and just start querying it. And it’ll give you answers to your questions. This was what makes it so powerful a tool. think there’s also, by the way, I’m using a tool now. This is not for podcasts, but along the same lines, it’s called Drip Drippp, three P’s. what I do here and it’s a paid service is

I take all of the AI email newsletters that I subscribe to, and I subscribe to probably 12 or 13 of them, and it gets all of them and sends me one email summary of what’s in all of them. So I’m now reading my one daily drip rather than all 13. Email.

newsletters, which is particularly useful because there are days I don’t have time to read any of those newsletters, but I find the time to read that one drip. this being able to repurpose, which is kind of what we’re talking about here, content to make it more consumable for you in the circumstances that you’re in. This is, I think, one of the powerful uses that we’re seeing a lot of people start to adopt AI for.

@nevillehobson (05:39.17)

Shel Holtz (05:49.931)

@nevillehobson (06:08.333)

And that was the one we talked about on AI being a part of your team, an AI chatbot and all that. So I uploaded the whole thing and asked it a couple of things and you’ll hear that in the transcript in a minute. But it got me thinking that the interview with Satya Nadella is worth a read. It’s quite concise, but you can project out your own thinking as to what this might mean and what Satya Nadella talks about his experience with it and particularly the multimodal element.

Your point about driving got it entirely, although if you’re commuting on a train or a bus, no big deal. You can just do it like that. But I think the idea of being able to tell the chat bot, give me a summary of the episode 458 and it’s got, it’s uploaded and it tells you that that might prompt further things. Tell me, you you and I talked about such as a topic. Give me the key takeaways that we discussed.

So it’s literally as fluid as that. It’s not more structured than that even. And the experiment I did, which may or may not be an indicator of wow or not, worked extremely well. There are some big downsides with this. And this I wondered about what Satya Nadella is doing about this, because the work in preparing the transcripts and uploading it to the chat bot, each time for each episode is severely not.

good from ease of use and all that. There’s big barriers that you’ve got to be really keen to do this. I did it. One thing I found, Nadella used Copilot. I knew few people using Copilot actively, but I know tons of people using ChatGPT. So I asked ChatGPT, can you do this? To which it replied, seriously, confidently, yes, of course I can.

@nevillehobson (08:28.755)

engagement function. But I did discover that the web app, the PWA on Windows 11 does support that. And so I engaged with the chatbot via the PWA, the personal web app on Windows 11 on my desktop computer, not the mobile. But it was an interesting experiment in my engagement with chat GPT that way, very conversational. And I was actually very impressed indeed with with how it performed.

So let’s include the clips so people can listen to it, Shell, because it was well done. It’s lightly edited to edit out some of the gaps in it to make for a better listening experience. And I’ve amplified the chatbots audio a bit because I was doing this on my microphone, the desktop, and the sound was coming out of the desktop speakers, which had to amplify a bit. But I think you’ll get the idea here. When I asked it to summarize, then I asked it specific questions about one of the segments we discussed. So let’s take a listen.

@nevillehobson (10:01.899)

Shel Holtz (10:24.711)

of the transcript. this is just going to get easier and easier as time goes on. The other thing that you mentioned having to create the transcript, a lot of podcasters are including a transcript in their show notes for SEO purposes, and we are among those. I don’t edit it. I don’t go in and fix all of the errors. I don’t have time. It’s raw. So that at least somebody searching for some keywords might find us. But all you would have to do with

@nevillehobson (11:14.391)

Shel Holtz (11:20.743)

@nevillehobson (11:27.241)

but that doesn’t scale. this isn’t, in my view, this is not a prime time tool for everyone to think, wow, I can use this. This is if you’re keen, if you’ve got the patience and the time to go through the prep. So you prep 10 episodes, let’s say, or even your transcripts. Let’s say you speak, you’ve got the ideal audio environment in which you’re recording, in which case the recording software will pick up everything about 99 % correctly, like Riverside that we do, for instance.

And that’s got a method to smooth some of the stuff. Or you’ve got Descript. I mean, there are tools you can do this. The point, though, is there are still separate tools you’ve got to use to get this into the state before you can upload it and share it with the chatbot. That may well be a barrier too much for people. The idea is fabulous, I think. I love this idea, which is why I was so keen on trying it out myself. And I think it is going to be part of the landscape pretty soon, just without all the barriers, hopefully.

Shel Holtz (12:52.009)

@nevillehobson (12:59.925)

Shel Holtz (13:20.595)

@nevillehobson (13:29.335)

Sure. I think this is in that area, of course, this is just another method of engaging with the content. It isn’t intended to do this instead of listening to the podcast. Not at all. If you want to do that, like you said, get a summary, whether it’s 20 minutes or five hours, that could be handy. It might work good for if you’re the kind of person who likes trying out new things. There is a new podcast. don’t know. Let’s get it. Let’s upload the transcript and get a summary. mean, that’s maybe not, you know.

daily activity. But all of this will be part of the landscape to make things a lot easier. And I could even imagine that one of the chat bots, you’re not going to go through all this stuff of uploading files and editing, you’re going to tell the chat bot to do that. Look at the file, get the transcript, see if it’s okay, share it with your colleague at ChatGPT. We’ll take it from there. But it’s a neat idea. I’d keen to know anyone listening, one of our listeners has done this with

Copilot or are you thinking about it? Who’s using Copilot? ChatGPT were hurdles. I wonder how that would be with Copilot. I did ask ChatGPT to compare this feature with Copilots, which it did. And it came back and Copilot excelled in areas such as complete integration with all your typical software apps you’ve got on your PC. Whereas ChatGPT, this is not integrated in the same way. That’s today. I suspect that’ll change.

Shel Holtz (15:02.582)

The post FIR #459: AI Transforms Content from Passive to Interactive appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.