Acast, the world’s largest self-sustaining podcast company, unveiled the results of a new study that explores the sentiment of podcast listeners towards potential use cases of AI on the medium. The study, which specifically examined weekly podcast listeners for its worthiness to create a personalized storytelling experience, improved listening quality, relevant advertising, and more.
“At Acast, we know that podcast audiences tend to be increasingly enlightened of and interested in technology compared to other mediums, so its no surprise that our research found listeners to be so interested in AI. However, what it unexpected well-nigh this study is just how unshut listeners are to AI infiltrating nearly every speciality of their current listening wits and for the technology to mold new ways for them to engage with the medium,” said Research and Insights Director at Acast, Tommy Walters.
According to the study, podcast listeners are most interested in AI stuff used to enhance the quality of the listening experience, with 82% saying they support the use of AI to modernize the sound by removing preliminaries noise, normalizing audio levels, and identifying and removing filler words or long pauses. Listeners are moreover interested in how the technology can be used to unravel lanugo language barriers as 80% said they support the use of AI for translating captions to various languages and permitting listeners wideness the world to enjoy them regardless of spoken language.
Podcast listeners are moreover supportive of how AI will potentially modernize the overall serviceability and discoverability of the medium. In fact, 79% support the use of speech recognition to automatically transcribe podcast episodes to make them searchable and accessible. Another 78% of respondents said they support the use of AI to generate captions in real time in order to make episodes increasingly wieldy to deaf audiences. Additionally, 74% said they support the use of AI to suggest specific podcast episodes highly relevant to a topic stuff discussed in the podcast stuff listened to and 72% support AI helping them to largest discover relevant podcasts.
Respondents were moreover interested in how AI could potentially be used to create a increasingly holistic and informative listening experience. In fact, 72% said they support AI serving them educational and informative materials related to the podcast while they are listening and 61% support its use for automatically generating video content to watch withal with the podcast. The study moreover found 64% of podcast listeners were supportive of AI stuff used to provide truth scores or suggestions of false statements stuff made to inform listeners. Additionally, 69% were interested in the use of AI to highlight relevant Tweets or social media traffic that happened considering of a discussion within a podcast episode.
These findings uncurl with a separate study Acast conducted in January of this year on the use of ChatGPT in podcasting, which found that 85% of podcast listeners believe that it’s upstanding for podcasters to use AI tools to create podcast content. Interestingly, though, in this January study just 57% of podcast listeners said that they expect ChatGPT and similar tools will modernize the quality of podcast content. The transpiration in sentiment infers that podcast listeners may be quickly realizing the full potential of AI tools wideness various aspects of the medium.
In fact, equal to the most recent research, podcast listeners are moreover supportive of the use of AI for podcast advertising. In fact, 65% of listeners said they support the use of AI for serving them relevant razzmatazz content. When it comes to voice simulations, 56% of listeners said they support podcasters leveraging AI to simulate them reading an ad instead of doing the host-read themselves.
