How AI is Changing Podcasting! | Jason Alafgani, Jellypod Co-Founder, Talks with Sam Sammane

what's jelly pod jelly pod is an AI podcast Studio where we democratize the storytelling for people that are just too busy to create podcast yes you can automate thousands of things but there's no guarantee that it'll be good you have this initiative sort of to clone the voice and start making content in this way we support that but we don't support people duplicating voices that they have no rights to don't be afraid to explore ways to be better at what you're doing using AI you should be aware of the things that are happening in your industry so first tell me about yourself about your ground and uh tell the audience why we need to care about your product my name is Jason Alfani I'm one of the co-founders of jelly pod the AI podcast Studio prior to jelly pod I've spent over a decade um at various Silicon Valley startups uh and tech companies and like a marketing or growth function and a big part of marketing or growth is often content specifically podcasts webinars so I've developed sort of a a passion for telling stories through this medium and with the the new wave of AI technology I met my co-founder Pearson we got to chatting and realized that there was a massive opportunity to help people make these very valuable pieces of content webinars podcasts in a very streamlined way and as sort of time went on we got more and more excited because what we realized was 90% of podcasts don't make it past the third episode so there's a lot of stories that people are trying to tell but they hit these technical barriers that prevent them from getting these really cool stories out in the world so that is what really keeps us going today and why we think everybody should care is there's a world of stories 99% of stories that are Untold that can get unlocked by something like jelly pod what's jelly pod jelly pod is an AI podcast studio so what that means is it's a tool an online tool that you can use to create C customizable AI podcasts in minutes and what that means is you can clone your voice you can design AI co-hosts to create The Who Behind a podcast and then you can add in things like research sources outlines to then begin creating the podcast then there's a final step where you edit the script we generate a script for you and you're able to edit just to get the accuracy to 100% just the way you like it and then there's a final generate audio button that creates the podcast in those voices with that content and then you can distribute it on to Apple podcast Spotify YouTube and anywhere else that supports an RSS feed can you duplicate famous voices it's a question that come to my mind not on our platform uh we only let people duplicate voices that they have the rights to so you know if you're the assistant of a famous person you know or you work for a famous person and you have this ini initiative sort of to clone the voice and start making content in this way we support that but we don't support people duplicating voices that they have no rights to so are you going to kill the human-based podcast no well we hope not our goal really is to 100x the the podcasting space as I said earlier there's this wealth of untapped stories that are itching to be told but then the next step is how do we get it out in the world so the way I think about it very much is like photography if you go back 100 years or even less than that photography was something that was only in the hands of a few people and then if you fast forward to today everyone's a photographer and everyone takes photos of their family many times a day and you know as such the medium has exploded and you still have professional photographers right who you still have photography competitions you still have amazing you know you have an amazing spectrum of quality but at the same time it sort of democratized this this awesome activity of Photography so we think that a similar thing will happen in the podcasting space where we democratize sort of the storytelling for people that are just too busy to be able to create podcasts on a regular basis I love when you say it's storytelling medium when you tell me it will not kill the podcast I'm still not convinced because practically F can create thousands of episode per day you are not going to jam the podcast environment I think that we've already seen this happen to a lesser extent with um the social media platforms so by making it so that any with Twitter anybody can start a micro blog right and then Instagram anybody can make a photo blog and and then Tik Tok right anybody can make their own sort of like almost video Studio the amount of content that was created exploded but that's what made these distribution platforms so uh important is that quality still matters right you can post a 100 billion Tik talks um but the good ones are the ones that get surfaced and that will appear in more people's feeds and in that same vein AI podcasts or any AI created uh media still has to be good and I think that's the critical part is yes you could automate thousands of things but there's no guarantee that it'll be good and if you can make thousands of high quality things that people want to listen to then more power to you that's awesome but we believe that people will be uniquely able to create really high quality podcasts in their niche in their unique story and for those good ones we think those will rise to the top do you think we can create uh a kind of virtual influencer that will have their own show using your kind of tools for a few years now I think there's been this whole trend of like faceless YouTubers so I think that in a way is already to some degree this AI influencer there are companies that specialize in making AI influencers for Tik Tok AI influencers for Instagram Etc that's not exactly what we're doing but you can definitely see a world where you know humans are using jelly pod to create AI co-hosts that have their own channels and that always speak on a on a particular subject so the short answer is yes there's certainly a way but it'll be unique from the way that more traditional AI influencer companies are trying to do it so tell me who is the perfect user for your kind of application since our launch we've seen an explosion of people all throughout we always believe that marketers business owners and people making uh content around learning we always thought that those three groups would find a lot of use in it but what I've been super surprised by is folks that you never expected to make podcasts doctors lawyers very busy people who don't have enough time in the day to do something like this they work all day work all night but for a few minutes every day they come in and they convert that day's Insight that day's experience into something for the world to enjoy how difficult it is to use the tool do I need special knowledge to generate my podcast we believe that us your experience is very streamlined a big principle that we have is just making sure that it's beginner friendly we want anybody with any amount of experience if you feel comfortable using a word doc we believe that it should be as simple as that so a lot of people can get through end to to end in in 5 minutes once you get really good at it you might be able to do it in 2 minutes what's your next step are you going to generate video podcast we are actively working on a few different threads but one of them is definitely visual absolutely the overarching umbrella that we're going to keep harping on for as long as we can is storytelling and helping people get this Vision out of their head and into the hands of other people but the thing that you want to tell and in today's day and age visuals are a big part of that video is a big part of Storytelling so we are today in the of AI talking about AI agents is jod going to support agents and can we like expect also jilot as an agent in other softwares we have definitely thought about and are you know are actively exploring how to use agents to improve the podcast creation process and the storytelling process like research agents you want agents that create charts for you for the visuals the list goes on and on and absolutely we definitely want to expand upon the platforms abilities to go out and do things on your behalf in service of making high quality content but jelly will definitely be expanding the way it can help people make and tell stories I think you have heard the last news about how deep seek is changing radically how we look at large language models what's your take on that the architecture that they are using isn't particularly new it's built on this idea of sing together experts and more granular tasks into one model as a result the system handles things more efficiently but nonetheless it is exciting to see these cost breakthroughs so what was expected around efficiency has changed drastically and I'm just excited for what that means for the space as a whole generally with any sort of technological breakthrough when someone has created a mass efficiency gain there's often the first immediate reaction which is like oh my God we don't need those any what I'm really excited about is this will unlock some incredible applications and some incredible breakthroughs and as a result I think this will only scale the amount of gpus needed and really just increase the footprint of AI in day-to-day life have been involved in a lot of startups and as you said we are in crazy time right now what do you think the future of startups someone come with an idea in less than two months you have a lot of competition and I think you are facing that already so tell me your take on that it is an incredible time for startups especially if you think of a startup as a small group of hungry individuals who are you know Against All Odds working to to deliver on some Mission the tooling that's available today can unlock some incredible outputs you can just go down the list of AI startups and you can see the valuations that they've gotten relative to the amount of people who work at their companies it's it's it's the biggest sort of valuation over employee that you've seen so I think just the impact that one person can have is so much larger as a result I think it's just a great time to be a startup founder and it's a great time for startups what are the three major um don't do that you will tell a new Founders today this one you hear a lot but just don't launch too late your startup isn't much until it has users so I would say launch as quickly as you can I guess the flip side of that is don't sacrifice quality so it's not just about getting something out there the last thing is be very cost efficient deep seek this is a great example of how all of a sudden with a fraction of the cost you can do as much as something that costs loads of money to make similar breakthroughs are always around the corner for any industry so try your best to be as efficient as possible what do you advise people who want to embrace AI the three major steps to be directly on the boat of AI today the first major step is I wouldn't try to chase something that isn't you and whatever you've been doing you should be constantly looking at a AI Technologies and finding ways to to utilize them better in what you're doing to become that much better to become the best of that thing as possible you know you've heard this expression AI won't replace you someone using AI will replace you so I think it's something similar don't be afraid to explore ways to be better at what you're doing using AI the first big step is you should be aware of the things that are happening in in your industry aware of what your competitors and people who are similarly trying to use AI to do their jobs better it's much easier to borrow than it is to make something net new I would listen to Fross industry applications there's something similar to what you do but not exactly what you do still try to see how they're applying it to their space and see if you can bring over an analog to your own the final thing is just iterate with so many things you know it's not going to work out the first time so continue to practice with AI tools you know just because you tried one thing and you thought it was going to be this unlock and you you used it and it didn't work out for you um doesn't mean that you should stop experimenting and stop trying do you have like a way to um verify the content if someone is using your platform to generate fake news we can right do you have any sort of verification mechanism we have like a system moderation system in place both at the script level and at the Audio Level it's not to police misinformation it's more focused on harmful content very violent things very graphic things so we call it moderation right and that's completely um AI or there is a human who will check what we are trying to record yeah it's all automated but we're constantly improving it and adjusting it to make sure that substantive information makes its way through but purely abusive purely harmful isn't what is your message to the new users of your tool the barriers to creativity the barriers to audio storytelling have been lifted I urge everybody to really just think about what is their unique perspective what is their unique unque Insight what space do they sit in think about how can you take some of that amazing stuff that you've learned over your life amazing stuff you're working on this week and uh find a way to get it out into the world and help other people learn from it what's about yourself and what's about your journey with this start up what's next is to continue growing we've got so much we want to build but we also you know want to make more and more of an impact in people's lives um I'm trying to do as much as I can to get the message out so I've got our company jelly pod will producing every Wednesday we're going to have a live stream on YouTube if anybody wants to listen to more of me talk please hop on me and Pearson my co-founder and we'll be chatting about all the latest are you creating podcast using jod for yourself uh absolutely I am we've made some really cool ones I've been primarily making them as proofs of concept most recently a big feature on Jelly pod that I love is host customization so beyond just customizing voices you know you want to customize the backstories and that leads to people who talk differently sound differently and who have different Dynamics between each other for example we made one that was I made one that was like a debate between two political extremes I made one where like a astrophysics Professor was explaining something to a freshman student on their first day of class which I actually really liked I'm a huge fan of like space related stuff um like the general relativity is fascinating black holes Etc but these Concepts you know are so hard to grasp so using the tool to make those things digestible for the average person to understand uh I love listening to always looking for new ways like that to show the flexibility of jelly pod and telling unique stories how you compare Julie tobooks notm is a fantastic tool it's free notm is fantastic for individual learning so if you're looking to to absorb information notbook Alm is the best tool out there if you're looking to project information out into the world then you should use jelly pod so NOA goem is about processing information like you haven't read something right right and you want to be able to you know quickly listen to it and get the gist of it the spark notes you give notebook ofm the content you listen to a summary of it that's awesome um but if you've got a unique perspective that you want to get out in the world and you don't want the AI to be taking you know all these Liberties saying what it wants to say then use jelly pod in short what I like to say is um like no bookm tells the AI story while jelly pod tells you your story and with this we can conclude it very uh amazingly if you want to tell your story go to jellly pod It's a Wonderful platform thank you for being in our show and if people want to contact you would you please provide them a way to contact you absolutely you can find me on Twitter you can comment on anything on social um or you can also email me at Jason jelly pod.