Apparently, they’re pretty bad. In doing some research and listening to a couple of examples, I was left slightly surprised by just how well these podcasts would work if they were written, voiced, and produced by a human instead. I found both of these podcasts on Spreaker.com, and below are my thoughts on them. I hope you enjoy reading my human thoughts on these AI-prompted podcasts.
Credit Nurse: CPR For Your Credit Score
- I liked that the episodes are short and straight to the point, with an average runtime of 3 minutes or less.
- I didn’t like that the host, “Nurse Nancy,” has an incredibly unsettling voice that is 100% AI. The quality of the voice performance was really low, felt incredibly stilted pacing-wise, and sounded very unnatural with the lack of inflection.
- Information seemed accurate overall, and the topic of discussing finances with your partner was handled well in the episode titled Financial Foundations in Love: Why Your Partner’s Credit Matters.
- There are NO background elements used on this podcast; it is exclusively the AI voice of Nurse Nancy with no music bed or sound effects.
- The overall production quality is quite low, with what sounds like minimal or no processing on the voice, and the voice sounds quite robotic. The spoken dialogue is easy to understand, but it has a distorted quality to it.
This podcast is incredibly bare-bones, and I think it could absolutely be improved by any work that even the most amateur producer or interviewer could do. The lack of a music bed, sound effects, and decent audio editing makes this a podcast that isn’t very interesting or engaging.
- There are some very interesting concepts discussed in the various sci-fi stories, but based on the over-embellished script, you can tell that it is very obviously written by an AI. The flow of the stories is often interrupted by the way they are written too, with each thought fumbling over the next.
- The music bed does feel like a good choice for a sci-fi story, but it is also the same bed for every episode, despite the fact that each episode is a different story. Though each story feels similarly bleak and dystopian, I suppose the constant droning music bed being the same on every episode adds to the oppressive atmosphere.
- The narrator of each story is a different AI voice, but the creator of this podcast seems to prefer two voices with English accents in the most recent episodes: a male voice and a female voice.
- The AI-generated voices have a shrill quality to them that is immediately noticeable, and deliver their scripts with a distinct lack of inflection and tonal variation. I would give them a fairly low rating in terms of believability. The pacing of the narrator’s delivery, regardless of the voice, is noticeably stilted and awkward-sounding.
If these stories were written and voiced by a real person, there was more variation in the music beds used for each episode, sound effects and intentional sound design were present, and there was more variation in tone from story to story, this could be an incredibly enjoyable series for me. But as it is now, it’s just kind of bland and depressing to listen to post-apocalyptic and dystopian sci-fi stories that are written and voiced unenthusiastically by AI.
