• by Ray Schultz , June 28, 2023

Podcast listeners are as upbeat about AI as the companies selling it, judging by a new study by Acast.

Audiences believe AI will help podcast producers improve their craft, resulting in a better, more holistic listening experience. 

The surprising thing is “just how open listeners are to AI infiltrating nearly every aspect of their current listening experience and for the technology to mold new ways for them to engage with the medium,” says Tommy Walters, director of insights at Acast.

Take these top ten use cases that podcast listeners support: 

1. To improve the sound by removing background noise, normalizing audio levels, and identifying and removing filler words or long pauses—82%
2. To translate captions to various languages, allowing listeners across the world to enjoy regardless of spoken language—80%
3. For speech recognition so that podcast episodes can be automatically transcribed, making them searchable and accessible—79% 
4. To general real-time captions, making episodes more accessible to deaf people—78%
5. To generate reports on listener drop off rates during the episode to better inform podcasters about what is and what is not working in their podcast—77% 
6. To generate show notes and summaries of the episodes—76% 
7. To suggest specific podcast episodes highly relevant to a topic being discussed in the current podcast being listened to—74% 
8. To generate trend reports for podcasters giving them insights into what similar podcasts to them are discussing—helping them to be relevant and unique—72%
9. To pull up educational/informative photos and information relating to the podcast while listening—72%
10. To better help me discover relevant podcasts—72% 

Don’t think that all of the uses are editorial. In addition, 65% want AI to make sure that they ads they hear are relevant. And 56% support efforts by podcasters to simulate themselves reading ads instead of actually reading the ads. 

The respondents also support use of AI to automatically generate video content to watch along with a podcast. And 64% think AI should be used to provide truth scores or calling out of false statements.  

Moreover, 69% feel AI should be used to highlight relevant Tweets or social media traffic related to a podcast episode. 

Acast Intelligence conducted research surveyed 400 weekly US podcast listeners, working with OnePulse.