Podcasting On Smart Speakers Isn't Dumb; It's The Future

PPS3E51 Podcasting On Smart Speakers Isn't Dumb; It's The Future - Transcript

[00:00:00] Smart speakers make for a tiny fraction of podcasts listening, and the experience is rather frustrating, but when Google, Amazon, and Apple finally decide to make a better experience, will your podcast be ready?

Hello, and welcome to another podcast. Pontifications with me, Evo, Tara. Smart speakers. Why are we talking about smart speakers, Evo, the expenses terrible. When we [00:00:30] listened to podcasts and I don't disagree with you. I've had smart speakers in my life for how many years now I'm going to say four. Three or four years, I've had a smart speaker.

Currently. I, my house is lousy with smart speakers. I have a Google smart speaker in every single one of my rooms. We have an Amazon smart speaker. I haven't gone the Apple smart speaker route, because look, you've got to pick a direction and just do something right. And in [00:01:00] all those times, the number of times I have listened to a podcast on my smart speaker is infant testing.

Really small. Maybe once or twice to see what the experience was, a handful of tests here and there. Look, it's just not a great experience, right? We're used to podcasting being the thing that goes in our ear buds. It's what we plug into our ears. When we walk around the house, we used to drive our cars. We listened to it that way, but we haven't quite got the.

[00:01:30] The habit yet, but I don't care. And I know that yesterday, my friend, Tom Webster put out a new bunch of data, which I haven't even seen that shows that smart speaker consumption has increased. That's the only data point that I know it's going up and I'm not surprised. No one should be surprised. Of course it's going up.

It's going up. It doesn't matter what we cranky podcasters. Think about it. Of course. Listener adoption of smart speakers is going up. So instead of talking about what it all [00:02:00] means and how, what percentage here and there, none of that matters because the future is happening for smart speakers. I'm sorry, just going to happen.

More people will continue to listen on smart speakers over and over and over again. So let me paint a picture for you, what the future might look like. Because as I said in the cold open, Google, Apple, Spotify. They could make a much better, a much more intelligent voice assistant interface for podcast listening than we [00:02:30] have today.

Here's my example of that. Let's say I have just heard about a show that I can't quite recall the name of overheard a conversation at work or a party back when used to go to parties. I know it has something to do with confetti in the name, but I know that confetti wasn't, it was like a play on a word in a play on some of the letters inside of confetti.

So if I go search for it right now on any of those three platforms, this is my experience in a nutshell. I ask [00:03:00] the device to play a podcast called confetti and it will, and it will fulfill my needs. It will play a podcast called confetti. Now it was a podcast I wanted probably not. Because there's a lot of podcasts that might be named confetti.

And it does that because what's it supposed to do? Say like a Google would, Hey, we found 1.7, 9 million results. Here they are. No, it can't do that. Right. The interface is somewhat limited. So it has to choose something today, [00:03:30] but does it in the future? I mean, think about for a moment, how much. More intelligence, Google, for example, could put into its voice assistant.

If it utilized everything, it already knows about you, all the things you've already given it permission to know and tell it Google every day. Why can't it really fast in the myriad data centers that Google operates all over the world, or even inside of the brains of the little devices, themselves, whatever, do [00:04:00] some parsing of the data there of your request.

Looking through things like your, you know, this is going to sound a little scary, but relaxed with four minute. Remember, Google already knows this about you, your browser history, search history. If you're on an Android, what your app history looks like? What YouTube videos you've watched look through your, you know, where you've traveled.

What's in your inbox, photos taken. Yeah. Files stored all of your own personal data. Why can't it look at that information to make a better [00:04:30] recommendation for you? Same thing goes for Amazon, by the way, they know what you bought, they know what you're reading and know what you're listening to. If you use prime video, like I do, it knows what you're watching, then all that personal data wants to get you've given to it.

Apple's not far off of that. They know what podcasts you listened to other than the ones you're listening for right now, all the things you do with your iPhone and lots more. So instead of those devices coming back saying here it is or worse asking you to [00:05:00] choose by reading out loud, the key word stuff, titles of 15 different podcasts.

What I guess, alphabetically and letting you some high. Remember I was number seven. Why can't it narrow the selection down or better yet? Why can't that intelligent voice assistant come back and say. Do you mean the confetti podcast about the little strips of paper or the one from the scifi convention in some mythical city [00:05:30] or maybe the one about the beverage tea?

Confetti, it could do that. Or why can't I ask you another question? Like, do you know the name of the host or what subjects does this podcast cover? Helping you narrow down your search? But now wait a minute. That's just the most recent episode, right? That's all it's going to play for you as the most recent episode, but that's rarely as I've said before, the best episode to play, especially for shows like serialized shows, why can't these [00:06:00] artificial voice assistant intelligent beings figure out that this show that I'm looking for is serial.

It is a serialized show. Why can't Hmm. Would you like to listen to season one, which is complete season two, appears to be ongoing and is on its 17 episode. Where would you like to begin? That would be an intelligent assistant helping me make choices, all of that as [00:06:30] possible. All of that is possible with what we know today.

Okay. It might take more processing power then. I'm thinking it might actually take and that, which is not an, uh, not atypical for me to underestimate the amount of development involved, various things. But again, it's all about possible to do today, but, but we have to help. We podcasters can't push that stuff forward, but what we can do.

[00:07:00] Is get our content cleaned up so that when scenarios like those three, that I just came up with 20 minutes before I started talking are actually possible that our content shows up there. Two things to do clean up your show level data. Yeah. I mean your title, if it's a crazy long keyword stuff, title, maybe don't do that.

Make sure the name of the hosts. Of the show are in there in the artists field. And I know the art, the author field is a dumb name for it. [00:07:30] Make sure your descriptive elements like your subtitle and your descriptions are really well written to make sure you've got it properly categorized, do all that, make it obviously what your show is and how it's different than the other ones out there.

Don't make any of these AIS guests, if that's what the person was looking for also, because it's not just about your most recent episode. Go clean up your episode level data, the habit properly Mark series versus episodic. Are you [00:08:00] using episode numbers? Are they consistent all the way through? Have you categorized each of your episodes?

Like I recently did for podcast pontifications do you have real solid episode details? So it's relatively straightforward to, for these systems to scan through and help understand what your shows are all about. And would we stop calling those show notes while we're at it? I think you win in the future where smart speaker listening continues to increase by [00:08:30] being the better described show.

It's always a game and you try and out position someone else. But regardless of every time I've played this game in various aspects of things like app optimization or search optimization or a local optimization. The company, the service, the pages, the content that is better described almost always wins.

So [00:09:00] go out, go forth, go through your content, cleaning up and prepare for the future and stop hating on smart speakers. It doesn't matter that you don't listen to them that way. I don't listen to them that way people do tomorrow, more people will, and that trend will not stop. So very quickly, don't forget.

Evil's long winter's nap is coming up. If you have content you'd like to share on podcast, pontifications get in touch with me. Evo at simpler media, buy me a coffee.com/evo. Tara, if [00:09:30] you would like to support the program, I would like for you to support the program and please tell a friend about podcast.

Pontifications the only way the show grows is when working podcasters like yourself, share it with another working podcaster like yourself. That's it. No episodes out are on Friday. So enjoy the longer weekend. And I shall be back tomorrow with yet another, no, not tomorrow. I'll be back on Monday with yet another podcast.

Pontifications cheers. [00:10:00] .

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