5 AI Tools To Help Your Radio Station
Managing a radio station can be a lot of work. Automate parts of your radio station with AI. Leaving you to focus on the best bits.
Whether we like it or not, AI is here and its here to stay. Remember the expression “there’s an app for that”? Now it’s very much a case of “there’s an AI for that”. From creating jingles to cleaning up audio, AI tools can pick up the work.
We’ve rounded up 5 types of AI tools that can be used for radio. These tools can even be combined with others. Making for powerful radio station automation.
5. Voice-cloning AI Tools
In June 2023, the world’s first* AI host made its debut and presented a whole radio show. AI Ashley was the cloned radio voice of radio DJ, Ashley Elzinga, on Live 95.5 in Portland, Oregon. AI Ashley, took over human Ashley’s Midday show.
This technology is available to the public through platforms like Speechify and ElevenLabs. What’s typical with AI tools, voice-cloning included, is to access them you’ll need to pay for a subscription. With ElevenLabs, for $11 a month you can clone your own voice and get 2 hours of generated audio.
4. AI Chatbots
Chatbots have come a long way since the MSN days. The new era of AI chatbots can pretty much generate any kind of copy you want. And in the conversational tone we use on the internet.
To demonstrate, here’s how ChatGPT explained AI tools like itself:
“When you interact with ChatGPT, you can ask it questions, seek information, get advice, or just have a friendly chat."
Giving an AI chatbot like Bard, Texta or ChatGPT an instruction (e.g. write me a radio script about...) is a great jumping off point to create content. Just remember to fact-check what these tools generate. Accuracy isn’t always their strong-suit.
3. AI Text-To-Speech Tools
Text-to-speech tools do what they say on the tin. They turn text to speech. Don't have enough presenting talent on your station? Text-to-speech tools can help, as you'll get to choose from an AI voice to use. This is how Radio Devon are getting around not having a full-time journalist. Their staff produce the news bulletins for their AI voice to present.
Alternatively, if you want to keep a presenter's voice, text-to-speech tools can be combined with voice-cloning. This is how Radio Sweden (Sveriges Radio) give their audience recommendations from a familiar presenter’s voice.
2. AI Music Generators
We’re all too aware of how confusing (and expensive) music licensing can be. Royalty-free music sites have plenty of songs, but scouring them can be timely. Got something particular in mind? Perhaps try an AI music generator.
AI music generators produce music and other audio (like jingles) with a few simple text commands. The copyright varies with each AI Music Generator. But different subscriptions offer the right licences for using these on your radio stations.
For example, on the AI music generator Soundful, a content-creator ($29.99 per year) subscription provides you with the necessary licensing to broadcast the generated audio on your radio station.
1. AI Audio Production & Processing Tools
Audio quality is everything, but striving for that crystal clear sound isn’t always easy. There are now various AI production and processing tools to help make it that much easier. Need to interview someone over Zoom? Krisp is a noise-canceling app that can make your audio sound super crisp whether it’s a live or pre-recorded interview. Say goodbye to the bad line excuse. Using this tool can really help ensure your interviewee’s speech is broadcast quality.
Meanwhile, tools such as Podcastle work as a full audio-processing suite. Podcastle offers multi-track recording, AI-powered noise-cancellation, auto-levelling, automatic fading and other audio effects. This is a powerful tool to produce a radio segment with ease.
Bonus: AI News Bulletin Generator
News can be tricky for radio stations. Listeners expect it, but it’s expensive and can be difficult to produce in-house. On top of that, to stay within the law news segments should be produced by qualified journalists. This puts it out of reach for many stations on shoe-string budgets.
As a solution, many stations turn to news providers to produce bulletins for them. While these can be an affordable option (FSN subscriptions start from $15 a month), an AI News Bulletin Generator, like RadioNews AI, can offer more flexibility.
RadioNewsAI uses AI to turn the copy of news stories in to speech. That could be one of the many AI voices, the platform has created. Or it could be your own cloned voice. Aside from the AI element, RadioNews AI differs from radio news providers in how news bulletins are generated. You can use:
- Your own stories. Useful for radio stations that are producing articles anyway.
- Links to particular news stories. Allows you to pick and choose what news you broadcast.
- An RSS feed of a particular news outlet. Automates your news segment so you don't have to manage it.
Whatever option you choose, make sure you have the permission from the source owner before using it.
RadioNews AI Cost
A subscription starts at $49 a month for 1-5 new stories a day. The pricing is based on how much audio is generated by AI. So depending on the length of a story, so this may vary.
How To Use RadioNews AI with Radio.co
In your RadioNews AI account, go to Newscasters.Complete your custom text. This should be an introduction to your news segment.
For example “You’re listening to the news from MCR Live. The time is {nexthour}, I’m [insert name] your newsreader.”
Add the news sources you want bulletins to be generated from (i.e. RSS feed, own article, or link to articles).
Go to Newscasters settings by clicking the 3 dots in the top right of the page. Make sure the audio format is set to MP3.
Go to Schedule and complete the times you want the news bulletins to be generated.
Go to Download options and under download URL, copy the second URL that ends in mp3.
Now, go to your Radio.co dashboard and under News, paste the URL into the news source block and hit save. We recommend adding an intro and outro jingle, as well as background music for the bed to make the news sound professional.
Under Bulletin Settings, set the frequency of your news bulletins. Ie. how often you want them to broadcast.
Once done, hit save and enable. You'll now be broadcasting AI generated news bulletins, as regularly as you've specified.
Final Thoughts
These are just some of the common AI tools helpful to radio stations at the time of writing. We expect more and more to pop up every week. And we won’t be surprised if we’ve missed some biggies. Will you be using an AI tool to help with your radio station? Let us know over on your favourite social media platform.
