Podcasting can take up a LOT of time but there are plenty of tools around that can take some of the most time consuming (and annoying) tasks off your plate.

In this episode, I walk through the AI tools that can help you speed up your podcasting workflow without compromising the quality of your show output.

From planning and transcripts to promotion and post-production, AI can take care o the grunt work so you can focus on the parts that need you.

What You’ll Learn:

• How AI can help you come up with episode ideas
• The best ways to use AI-generated transcripts to reduce workload
• The role AI can play in social content and video clips
• Why it’s still important to rely on your ear (and not just the tech) when you're using AI to fix audio

Platforms and tools mentioned:

• ChatGPT – for scripting, show notes, and content repurposing
• Claude – for content planning and AI writing
• Adobe Enhance – for cleaning up poor quality audio
• Auphonic – for levelling and audio polish
• Opus Clip – for auto-generating video clips
• Descript – for editing audio and video with text
• Riverside – for remote recording and AI clipping
• VEED – for video creation and captioning
• Canva – for visuals, reels, and promo content

EPISODE CREDITS:

Host: Rachel Corbett

Editing Assistance: Josh Newth

LINKS & OTHER IMPORTANT STUFF:

Find out how to work with me here

Download my free podcasting guide

Check out my online podcasting course, PodSchool

Click here to submit a question to the show

Email me: rachel@rachelcorbett.com.au

Follow me: Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok or check out my blog or the PodSchool website.

This podcast was recorded on the lands of the Wangal people, of the Eora Nation.

I pay my respects to Elders past and present.

Got dreams of being a professional podcaster, but have no idea what you're doing. This is impossible. That's about to change. A new kind of school. Welcome to the Pod School podcast.

Hello there. Welcome to the show. Today we're talking about AI, because who's not talking about it? Nobody. Really crept up on us, hasn’t it?

Now all of a sudden it's blanketed our lives until eventually it smothers us all. Let's hope not. Fingers crossed.

In the meantime, while we're all waiting to be smothered, I'm really keen on leaning into the elements that make my life a little bit easier. Because I tell you, podcasting's gotten real hard lately with the old video stuff.

So whatever we can do to change things and kind of make things a little simpler is always a good thing. So there are a few areas that you can use AI in your podcast and a few kind of spaces where it's going to improve things for you.

The first thing is around accessibility. Having a transcript of your podcast, which can be AI-generated, is going to be really helpful to help your podcast be more accessible, so searchable. So that's really important.

It can also help with idea generation. So one of the toughest things about podcasting is making sure if you are going to have an always-on show, that you have content that you can ship up every single week.

So AI can really help with giving you a starting point to work from. You can ask it to generate 52 weeks of content after you've given it a bit of information about your show.

Now, I can guarantee you those 52 weeks are not going to be like, print it, done. Sometimes it'll spit some stuff out and you're like, “What? No.”

But will it give you something to think about and to start getting your mind thinking about? “Okay, well, how can I actually tweak that a little bit?” Actually, there's something in here that might be kind of useful. So you're not starting from that blank piece of paper.

And then the third thing is really around time saving.

What are the parts of your podcast workflow that you can feed into AI to really help you to cut down the time it takes you to create your show? Podcasting, if you are doing it properly, is not a five-minute exercise.

And most podcasters, until they get to the point where they have a significant enough audience to start to monetise, to start to build revenue in a various bunch of ways, they're doing it probably on top of their full-time job.

I certainly am, because this is my passion project that builds into my business and the thing that I've been doing for years.

But I have a job running networks, I have a child, I have a business. So this is happening in the stolen hours of my life.

So anything that I can use to make it easier to create content that I then work on — don’t be just taking what ChatGPT spits out and then going copy and paste, because that's what everybody's whinging on about online, because everybody sounds the same.

But can you use it to your advantage? And is it cheating? Absolutely it’s not.

Especially if you are feeding into it your thought processes, your content, your transcripts. That stuff is already content that's in your words, that you have created.

And then if you're asking it to generate content out of that, you are working with your own source material.

It's really important to use that to your advantage and to cut down some of the things that can honestly be a bit of a punish in the podcasting process.

So let's start with that bit. Using a tool like ChatGPT — Claude is another one.

Whichever one you like, doesn’t really matter which one you use as long as you kind of train it.

The more you use it, and the more you train it around your voice, your content, your ideas, the better it will become at giving you output that is going to be closer to what you want.

Again, you're never going to get it to the point where it's perfect. And I don't think we should be aiming for that either.

Because heaven forbid, like the world of the content that we're consuming — if all we're consuming is ChatGPT-created content.

Let us save ourselves from the smothering by continuing to use our brains and making sure that we can add value with the smarts and the experience that we have.

So ChatGPT can be really good when you are generating all of the content around your show.

It can be really good in the idea generation phase, as I mentioned, if you're just like, “Gosh, I've got to plan out the next few weeks of content and I just need something to start with.”

It can also be excellent at generating all of the content that you need after your show is recorded.

This is where it really works hardest for me, because often I'm fielding questions on this podcast. So I'm getting a lot of that content from you because there are things that you want to know.

But when I really am like, “Thank God for you, little ChatGPT engine,” is when I'm on the other side, the show is done, the transcript is created — I just use my podcast host, and a lot of podcast hosts have AI now built into them.

So you might not even have to use a secondary system to do that. You might be able to do that all within your host.

Once I've got that done, that text there is my content in my words.

And then I use AI to go through the process of pulling out all of the stuff that I need.

After that — tips that I can share on social media, carousel ideas, blog posts, emails, you name it — I ask it to generate it and then I work on that content from there.

Prior to this, I used to literally manually take my transcript, go through it line by line, write a blog post off that transcript, then go back into that blog post and take out all the tips and pull them out manually into a spreadsheet.

Now ChatGPT does all of that in five seconds flat.

So that I think is the most valuable use, because promotion is one of the biggest things that you need to do to get people into your podcast.

And that doesn't take one message on social media. That takes constant repetition, constant reminding, constant sharing — and in many different ways. Because you don't know what piece of content is going to resonate with someone.

So the more of those ideas you can have that you can then work on, the better.

And that, I think, is one of the areas that using AI is the most valuable at this point in time.

That is the stuff that still requires editing.

But fine. You don't want to be shipping out content that was written by AI, especially if it's associated with your brand, your idea, your show — that has to reflect you, that has to be in your voice.

But in terms of just taking some of the grunt work out of that process, it can really help.

The other little tip — I actually get a transcript generated within my podcast host, and then I ask ChatGPT to clean it up just for grammar and spelling mistakes.

Ask it: “Please do not change anything. Do not paraphrase.”

Now, sometimes you've got to watch it, because it does like to paraphrase and turn your words into something else. So you just have to keep going back — “Not what I asked for, mate. Just give me what I asked for.”

But that process of actually cleaning up the transcript — I used to do that manually. I used to read through the transcript. Now, if you are doing an hour-long show, that is a punish. That is an utter punish.

But if you can get some of that done without having to read through it line by line, then you can actually upload a transcript for people who need it.

For the vast majority of people prior to this technology, uploading a transcript was a real nice-to-have, but it wasn't possible. Because even if you could generate it, you often didn't have the time to go through it line by line and make sure that it was actually quality output.

Because if somebody needs a transcript and wants to read your show, you want to give them a version that’s not crap.

Like, the idea is not for them to have a crappier quality version of what you're creating. It's for them to have another way of consuming it.

So that for me has been a real small trick that has really saved me so much time and means that now I can attach a transcript to every single one of my episodes, no problem. Because I'm comfortable that it’s shot things out in the way that I need it to be shot out.

Another area that AI is really useful for — but not perfect (you're noticing a theme here; we cannot just set and forget here, even though as much as we’d love to) — the other thing is in audio cleanup.

So I have always been a very traditional audio person. I like to do the changes to my audio manually. I do not like one-touch editing.

I don't think that a lot of the tools out there often create content that genuinely sounds like it hasn't been processed.

And I think the more that people use it, the more they lose their ear for what normal audio sounds like.

So I would preface this little suggestion by saying you must listen to this stuff.

And you must think: “Does this actually sound robotic? Does this sound like I'm sitting in a room? Or does this sound like this has been passed through a computer?”

I think you need to be really mindful, because it doesn't take too many tweaks for that to tip over into that space. And it's something you want to be really careful of.

A couple of really good tools — Auphonic Audio, Adobe's Enhance.

I have used that a lot and I tell you, I've tried to hate it, because I don't like one-touch processing. But it's real hard, because it's real good.

And if you back the processing off — you know, you would never put it at 100% because remember, if you are doing one-touch processing, it's just applying a whole bunch of things across your entire thing.

When you would do it manually, you'd go in — maybe I need to up this or down this or adjust this slightly or whatever. You're listening for certain things and you're tweaking and fine-tuning.

In this case, AI is just listening to it and saying, “Well, these are the kind of things that I feel like it needs.”

So it just does a big blanket process. But you definitely want to be putting it down.

Like sometimes I'll use 5%. It has a sliding scale on Adobe Enhance. I would maybe put in 4, 5%. Sometimes I might go to 20, depending.

But I will never go past the point that it sounds natural.

And you can start to hear that more robotic, computer sound that can come into highly processed audio. So that is the — watch out for that.

These tools are really good. You should absolutely use them. But just use your ear critically and make sure that you are still creating a podcast and content that sounds really good and sounds like you are in a room with somebody. Sitting down, enjoying their company. Not listening to them through some weird computer mainframe.

The next thing is around video social cutdowns. I think this is where we’re not quite there yet.

And I mean, by the time this episode goes out, it could have already changed because everything's moving so fast. It’s like 24 hours — something’s old now.

But the thing about the clipping tools, around video especially — I’ve tried a lot of them. I don’t think any one of them nails it. And I also think it's entirely dependent on your kind of show.

If you have a show with a co-host where it’s all about you and the banter and whatever, and you’re not really working in sections or you’re not working in a way where the transcript might be able to give away where the edit points are, I would say it's very unlikely to be able to get the really killer moments pulled out in short clips using AI.

I have a show that’s about teaching people things and talking about podcasting, and there's usually kind of sections and areas in the show. So it's kind of a bit easier to see — particularly since it’s one person talking and not multiple people talking — this is sort of where the beginning of that point is and the end of that point.

But even then I will see some of the clips that I generate and be like, “Why have you ended it there?” Or “Why have you started it there?”

And I think one of the things about choosing the right promotional clips for your show that you really have to remember is that they are like the only thing that somebody might consume from your show.

So you might be doing those things to get people into the audio, but the vast majority of people that watch those things online are going to consume them in that platform and then not come to your show.

So they have to be standalone, good content by themselves. They have to make sense as a beginning, middle and an end.

They can't sound like they've just come in halfway through a conversation.

Yes, you can cut it off at the end if your point is to say, “Oh, if you want to listen to this, come to the podcast.” And that sometimes works well — if that works for your content.

But choosing those clips is a really important skill, and I don't think AI has it nailed just yet.

There are a number of platforms like Riverside, VEED, Opus Clip that do this and I would just encourage you to experiment with them.

Descript is also doing a lot of this kind of AI-based video editing with its AI tool, Underlord. I’m currently experimenting with full-length episodes of this podcast to see if I generate some prompts, whether it can actually at least do a first-pass kind of cut and whether that works or not.

So I still think there’s a lot of work to be done in this space. It’s not perfect. It’s getting there. It improves every day.

But you might find that when you put your content into it, it generates exactly what you need. I think it just depends case by case, and you really just need to give it a crack, see what works.

And then — no matter how much time it saves — you never let that be the thing that makes you make the decision.

Because if you’re like, “This quality of content is not good,” it doesn’t matter how much time it saved you. Because it’s not going to do what you are hoping it will do, which is bring in more audience and get more people interested in your show.

The idea of these tools is to cut down the time it takes you to make a really high-quality show, but to not compromise on the quality of that show while you're doing it.

It’s about saving you time. It’s about doing more with the time you have.

It’s not about decreasing the quality of your show, because ultimately that will just turn people away, and you are really in the game of trying to get more ears onto your content.

So hopefully that’s helped you.

As I said, I’ll link to some of these tools in the description.

For me right now, those kind of ChatGPT-style tools that can help you come up with ideas and just get something on paper that you can then work with are really the thing that I use the most.

Again, the audio editing stuff is really good as well. And Adobe Enhance — if you have any kind of audio that you actually think is unusable — I think this is where the tool really shines.

Because there’s been a couple of times at the network I run where we’ve had some guests for an international podcast and they didn’t even have earbuds, they didn’t even have headphones — nothing.

So they’re being recorded in a computer mic in an echoey space. And if you know anything about audio, that's already going to make your skin crawl because that never sounds good.

And we threw it through that thing and we were going to chuck that audio in the bin. And ten years ago — I mean, five years ago, two years ago — I would have chucked that audio in the bin.

But it really cleaned it up. And I've worked with a lot of audio producers in my time, and a lot of audio producers couldn't have cleaned that up. We’ve tried. But we wouldn’t have gotten it to where we needed it to be.

So yeah, it can be really, really great. But you just want to make sure that the focus is always on the highest quality content that you can produce.

And don’t ever let your use of AI compromise that in any way.

Hopefully that has helped you to think about how you might be able to cut down some of the time — the long, long time — that goes into making your podcast episodes.

Anything that we can do to let this technology help us continue to release great content every single week — because if you want to grow an audience, that’s what you need to do — is really great.

So give things a try. I’ll link them in the show notes.

I’ll also link down there to my podcast equipment guide that you can download, which gives you all the gear that you need if you’re like, “I really want to get set up.”

There’s also a link to my “Work with Me” page — I’ve got some one-on-one coaching and other ways I can help you with your podcast that you can check out as well, including my online podcasting course, PodSchool.

So thank you so much for listening. If you have a question that you would love answered, please submit it below in the description of the episode.

And hopefully I’ll see you next week.

That's all for today.