India-based audio series platform creater Pocket FM aims to be the Netflix of audio. That is, the company intconcludes to match its audio series with hundreds of episodes to its applyrs’ tastes. For that to work, it requireds to release content rapidly — something it’s now turning to AI to assist with.
The Lightspeed-backed startup is giving its writers an AI tool set that can do things like suggest better concludeings to an episode or create the narrative more engaging. The hope is that the tools will speed up the story-writing process.
Pocket FM already applys 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, stated it’s rolling out the AI tools to all writers, so it will take them less time to finish their episodes.
The writing tool, dubbed CoPilot, can be applyd to assist 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 creates 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 creates applyrs 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 recommconclude concludeings for an episode to create it more exciting. AI can also suggest tags for background effects that can be applyd 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 compacter models to maintain context for a story for character arcs and relations, along with narrative consistency. Plus, utilizing signals from applyrs, 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 alter 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 applyrs in the European countest last year.
Nayak stated the company saw great results from this trial, with a constant increase in monthly in-app revenue, which crossed $700,000 in June.
“When we started expanding into new regions, it applyd 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 applyrs and scaling the market. Now we can do this in less than three months,” Nayak stated.
The tool increased writer productivity by up to 50% for the German market in terms of display output. Plus, the tool assisted the company create more error-free drafts of the displays that resulted in higher applyr retention for audio series.
In the U.S., series created with the assist of these new AI tools are now contributing 10% of playtime. Plus, these displays have generated $7 million in revenue in the last 12 months while reducing the cost of production by 2-3 times.
Building tech to scale content generation
As a result of adopting different AI features internally, Pocket FM has been able to scale the content quickly. The startup stated it launches close to 1,000 pilots per month. And just the sheer volume of content results in a few of them becoming hits.
But the audio display is just one part. The company is already working on tools to convert stories into comic strips with its Pocket Toons platform. Plus, Nayak stated video is a possible format the company could explore, too. The startup, which has raised over $196 million in funding across rounds, is experimenting with a micro drama app as well.
By next year, Pocket FM wants to release its own singular large language model (LLM), which will be based on data collected from its displays and incorporate different tools like writing assistance, adoption, dramatization, and story context retention. The company stated that when it switches to its own LLM, it won’t required to train a ton of compact models for separate features.
AI’s potential downsides
Adopting AI has had its side effects.
Pocket FM has already laid off people who were employees or contractors across multiple rounds in the last 12 months. There have also been reports of writers seeing diminished returns over time. And the company is facing lawsuits in California over employment and wage issues.
“Like most content-led industries, we work with a diverse network of writers, voice artists, and production partners on a project basis, tailoring resources to each market. AI has had minimal impact on our core creative community; instead, it has opened new avenues to expand reach and output,” a company rep stated, in response to these layoffs.
There are questions around quality, as well. The company measures quality by the retention numbers of a display.
The base argument is that the new AI tools act as a writers’ room even for solo creators, so they will be able to produce more content at a rapid rate. Plus, based on the numbers, writers can quickly edit the story with the assist of AI. However, these tools can very well induce “AI slop” — or low-quality, AI-generated content — into the platform and could impact a applyr’s recommconcludeations, creating it difficult for them to discover good stories.
Pocket FM argues that stories that have a solid structure will gain popularity, despite AI assisting them.
The company noted that every piece of content is reviewed by its AI-powered moderation framework to ensure quality and originality. It also claims its AI moderation checks for things like duplication, copyright issues, content health, and other quality measures before approving audio to go live. Each display receives an equal push, and applyr engagement ultimately determines a display’s ranking.
Another concern is that writers could become overly depconcludeent on AI over time.
In Germany, AI is writing more content than humans per display for select titles. With Pocket FM’s plans to roll out more AI tools, the amount of AI-written content could increase. And with that, the expectation of churning out more displays could rise, too. Unless applyr adoption also rises rapidly, average returns could drop.
The company didn’t directly address TechCrunch’s questions about returns, but stated that its AI tools can speed up a writer’s work and assist them edit an episode based on numbers and audience feedback. That is they could create tarobtained improvements, instead of doing a full rewrite.
“This way, quicker content creation doesn’t necessarily dilute quality or relevance; it just shifts the writer’s role towards editing, refining, and steering more productive output,” a spokesperson stated in a statement.
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