Wondercraft

We ran a survey of The Neuron readers and asked them what more they'd want to see from us in the coming year. Podcasts made the top 5 requests. So we looked into it.

The trouble with podcasts is that quality matters a lot. You can't just sit around in some plain old room, hit record and start talking. You need quality audio (which means the right equipment and room setup), good energy from the speakers and the right editing.

That's a lot to do, especially if we wanted to do a shorter daily podcast that mirrors our newsletter. Then, we found Wondercraft.

Generating an episode in 2 minutes

Yup. Within just a couple minutes of signing up, we were able to produce a podcast episode around one of our newsletter stories. The workflow really was as simple as that:

1. Paste in the story as-is, no changes
2. Edit the script for any obvious flaws
3. Press go

The podcast episode was pretty darn good for how long it took! Here's a real podcast episode produced by the Wondercraft team. Apparently, it became a top tech podcast in just 30 days!

Best for news/educational podcasts

Wondercraft is not made for every podcast. Where we think Wondercraft doesn't do well today:

• Comedy/drama shows
• Unscripted talk shows
• Interviews

The reasons why are pretty self-evident. You can't script something where the magic comes from unscripted moments. And AI-generated voices currently don't have the emotional fluctuation to really drive home things like comedic timing, etc.

But other podcasts - specifically news and educational podcasts - are totally possible using Wondercraft, in our minds. The voice has just enough tone and inflection to make it not sound completely boring, with clear articulation and the right pacing for the audio format.