Mind Readings: Making a Podcast with Generative AI, Part 1

In today’s episode, you’ll discover how to create engaging podcast content with the help of generative AI. You’ll learn how to set up your audio, prime ChatGPT to conduct interviews like a pro, and avoid common podcasting pitfalls. Tune in to unlock the secrets to producing compelling audio content that captivates your audience!

Mind Readings: Making a Podcast with Generative AI, Part 1

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What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for watching the video.

In the last couple of weeks, folks have been playing around with Google’s NotebookLM as a way to create podcast-style audio from documents. Give NotebookLM a document, and it can create an audio sample. I’ll pull up NotebookLM on my second screen here. I’ll go to the Notebook Guide here, and it can create a deep-dive conversation. This uses Google’s AudioLM system through Google TTS, pretty sure, using their Journey voices. My guess is that Gemini—the engine that powers NotebookLM—creates a diarized transcript of what it’s going to say, of the summary with SSML tags, and then passes that to Google TTS, which generates the very realistic-sounding voices.

Here’s the problem with this. It’s a cool tool. It creates a seven- to nine-minute podcast-style discussion. You have no control over it. You just hit the Generate button, and it creates a thing. That thing is fine. It’s a nice summary, but you have no ability to edit it. You have no ability to control it, and it has none of you in it.

So, while I was out for my run today, I thought to myself, “What if we were to create a way for you to do an audio podcast style with generative AI using ChatGPT’s advanced audio mode and have it be interesting? Have it be something that might be worth listening to because it wouldn’t be machines talking; it’d be you being interviewed by a machine.”

How are we going to do this? Well, this is going to be a multi-part series. We first have to create the instructions for ChatGPT to be able to interview us. Then we have to deploy those instructions on our device. Then we have to be able to get a conversation going using the advanced audio mode.

So, prerequisites. The hardest part, believe it or not, is getting the audio set up. So, I have here—and I’ll see if I can tilt my camera down—I have the Rodecaster Pro, and I have my iPhone connected to that via Bluetooth. Whatever your audio setup is, you need to get audio from your phone to some kind of recording interface. It could be a soundboard. It could be straight into your computer, but you need to get your audio captured from your device and from you.

So, I’m using my Rodecaster. I’m using my Shure SM7B here, which is tied into the Rodecaster. So, all of the audio for this is coming through one port. You could do it with multiple ports; plenty of people do. But that’s going to be the hardest part, and I can’t give you much guidance on it because I don’t know what kind of hardware you have. But part one is: get working audio from your device to your desktop.

If you just don’t have the hardware, then the workaround is to take your device and turn on screen recording mode, which I have set to my thing here. What this will do is it will record all the audio coming off your device. Then you have your audio being recorded on your laptop or whatever, and you’re going to need to sync it up in post-production. In the audio editor of your choice, you have to bring the two tracks together. So, you’ll probably need to do the usual, like clap your hands, to make sure that you can line up the two audio tracks. But that is the hardest part. It took me 45 minutes to work out all the different combinations just from my setup. But when you do it right, it works pretty well. So that’s part one.

Part two, we need to go to ChatGPT now and start asking it questions about how to do interviews. Let’s flip over. We’re going to go to ChatGPT, and we’re going to start with the priming process. If you’re not familiar, go to trustinsights.ai/pare (P-A-R-E), and this will give you the layout of what we’re going to do. We’re going to start with saying, “You’re an interviewing expert in the style of Sean Evans from Hot Ones, Larry King, Barbara Walters. What do you know about conducting a great interview, particularly for a podcast?”

Okay. So, we now got the first step of the PARE process. Let’s now ask it, “What are some common mistakes made by less experienced interviewers and podcasters when conducting guest interviews?”

Okay. Part two is done. Now we’re going to follow up. We’re going to follow up with sort of a refresh and say, “What are some expert tips and tricks for interviewing guests on a podcast that we have not discussed yet?”

Okay. We have now completed the priming process. We’ve asked the model: what do you know about a topic? What are some mistakes about the topic? What are some expert tips and tricks we haven’t talked about yet? This priming process is super helpful for getting the tools.

So we’re going to start with the priming process, and then we’re going to create a tool that we’re going to use to create the interviewer. So stay tuned for that. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button. Subscribe to my channel if you haven’t already. And if you want to know when new videos are available, hit the bell button to be notified as soon as new content is live.

Mind Readings: Making a Podcast with Generative AI, Part 1

Machine-Generated Transcript

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