India-based audio series platform maker Pocket FM aims to be the Netflix of audio. That is, the company intends to match its audio series with hundreds of episodes to its users’ tastes. For that to work, it needs to release content rapidly — something it’s now turning to AI to help with.
The Lightspeed-backed startup is giving its writers an AI tool set that can do things like suggest better endings to an episode or make the narrative more engaging. The hope is that the tools will speed up the storywriting process.
Pocket FM already uses some AI tools like ElevenLabs to generate voices for audio series. It also tested AI tools for writing and adaptation assistance internally.
Rohan Nayak, Pocket FM’s founder, said it’s rolling out the AI tools to all writers, so it will take them less time to finish their episodes.
Image Credits: Pocket FM
The writing tool, dubbed CoPilot, can be used to help any writer create a story.
CoPilot can transform narrative-based writing into dialog-based writing for a specific segment. It can also do “beat analysis” to shape the writing in a way to makes it more engaging for an audio series of a particular genre. The tool additionally has basic chatbot-style writing features such as “shorten,” “expand,” and the ability to generate text via a prompt.
To build CoPilot, the company examined thousands of hours of data points to understand what makes users engage more with a particular storyline in a specific genre.
Based on that, it added writing suggestion features designed to increase conflict between characters and recommend endings for an episode to make it more exciting. AI can also suggest tags for background effects that can be used while producing the audio.
The tool can automatically generate bios of characters, their relationships, and summarize plot points of different episodes, allowing creators to refer back to these details while writing.
CoPilot also has a review tool, which checks for plot points, grammar, and leaves qualitative feedback through comments on an episode.
Under the hood, Pocket FM is training smaller models to maintain context for a story for character arcs and relations, along with narrative consistency. Plus, utilizing signals from users, the startup is nudging AI to add more drama to the story.
International expansion and localization plans
Alongside the arrival of the AI tools, Pocket FM launched adaptation tools for various markets that not only translate the text from one language to another but also change names and phrases that are more suited to that region’s culture.
The company first debuted this tool as a part of the CoPilot suite in Germany earlier this year to convert stories from other regions after reportedly struggling to engage users in the European country last year.
Nayak said the company saw great results from this trial, with a constant increase in monthly in-app revenue, which crossed $700,000 in June.
Image Credits: Pocket FM
“When we started expanding into new regions, it used to take us 12-18 months to meaningfully exist in that market. You have to have at least 1,000 hours of content to start acquiring users and scaling the market. Now we can do this in less than three months,” Nayak said.
The tool increased writer productivity by up to 50% for the German market in terms of show output. Plus, the tool helped the company create more error-free drafts …