Many publishers are doing interesting work using audio applications of GenAI. A couple of them caught my eye because in each case, the newsroom is easily extending its ability to reach new audiences by using GenAI — and ensuring human judgment is applied carefully as well. 

The first is at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), where they are experimenting with providing a “valuable, tailored service” by providing a daily audio summary of football news for fans of three clubs and a twice weekly summary for two more clubs.

The broadcaster will run GenAI on existing BBC articles about the clubs to produce a draft audio script and then generate an audio recording of the script using a synthetic voice.

Its editors will check each script and recording for accuracy before publication, “and we will clearly highlight our use of AI to listeners in line with the BBC’s AI transparency commitments,” said the BBC’s executive sponsor of GenAI, Rhodri Talfan Davies.

The pilot will run for four weeks and will be published at 5 p.m. each day. 

Why is doing it this way a good idea? The BBC is: 

• Creating a habit for its listeners. 

• Using segmentation to ensure the right content reaches the right audience.

• Using GenAI to create a new format for already existing stories written by reporters (rather than using AI to generate the stories).

• Reaching new audiences, e.g., football fans who may not have the ability or the time to read about their team.

• Running a limited-time, limited-scope pilot to “explore whether the use of synthetic voice can be deployed to create new, more personalised content experiences, and to test how users respond to them.”

• Building something that can scale easily to cover major U.K. football clubs in a country where the sport is akin to religion.

Another innovative audio application that caught my eye was a niche product with a very clear aim. This is the AI Talks With Bone & Joint, a four-minute podcast where GenAI is used to summarise a recent study from one of Bone & Joint’s four journals and then is narrated by synthetic voices.

The publisher is happy because the podcast raises awareness in the orthopaedic medicine community of Bone & Joint’s journals as a destination for research papers (submitting authors pay a fee) — and because the podcast has even been nominated for an award. The authors of the summarised reports are happy with the podcast because their papers get extra promotion.  

Bone & Joint is, admittedly, not my normal media consumption, but I did listen to a couple of audio summaries and found them fascinating (ask me about thigh bone fractures!) — and worth highlighting here because the publisher is doing many things that all of us ought to be doing:

• Listening to their audience: The podcast is deliberately “bite-sized” because the journals’ busy audience members have “these small nuggets of time,” according to Bone & Joint’s director of publishing and innovation, Emma Vodden.

• Drawing people down the sales funnel: The AI podcast is based on Bone & Joint’s open-access journals, but it also has two paywalled publications and a “very successful” human-hosted podcast.

• Easily reaching a new audience through a new product: GenAI lets the publisher, which has a staff of 16, stretch easily without disrupting their workflow or adding significant costs.

• Ensuring newsworthiness by having editors pick which papers are summarised in the podcast.

• Ensuring accuracy by having authors of the summarised papers check the draft scripts.

• Maintaining trust with listeners: The title transparently makes it clear to the listener that they are listening to machines, not humans.

Both publishers used ChatGPT for their audio scripts and ElevenLabs for their synthetic voices.

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