Audio platform Pocket FM taps into AI tools help it expand content catalog

India-based audio platform Pocket FM has greater than 200,000 hours of content material on the service. Nonetheless, the corporate’s CEO, Rohan Nayak, believes that the platform nonetheless has room to develop by way of creating unique content material and increasing its library to a number of genres and sub-genres. The quickest method to try this is to faucet into AI instruments that might assist in audio manufacturing, writing methods, and adapting these tales for various geographies.

“I nonetheless really feel that our content material catalog isn’t enough for our customers. There are such a lot of genres and sub-genres that we don’t have in our library. I don’t suppose we’ve a depth of content material that’s within the mature leisure class,” Nayak instructed TechCrunch over a name.

The corporate already has an outstanding partnership with ElevenLabs to transform writings into audio sequence. This has resulted in 5 occasions faster manufacturing and 30 occasions decrease price as in comparison with a professionally generated audio sequence.

“We have now already examined how these AI variations carry out in several markets, and we’ve seen encouraging outcomes. We’re nonetheless refining our fashions for errors, however we really feel the know-how is nice sufficient to make use of within the manufacturing of exhibits,” Nayak stated.

One of many AI instruments Pocket FM is making an attempt out caters to the adoption of tales in several areas. The corporate stated it has skilled in-house fashions that don’t take a look at mere translation however deal with cultural nuances when changing tales of 1 area to a different.

He added that it’s difficult to resolve the hallucination of the fashions within the context of tales that span a whole lot of episodes. Pocket FM stated it needed to sort out the limitation of context home windows of open-source fashions and likewise construct maps of relations between completely different entities in a narrative to keep up character consistency.

One other software for writers the corporate is testing works as a artistic assistant to them, serving to them with various storylines or giving them concepts about plots. The corporate additionally plans to infuse some insights from its historic information within the software to point to writers what works on the platform.

Nayak talked about that whereas this software is in its early levels, the corporate needs to offer the ability of a author’s room to a solo author, who is perhaps placing out an episode of a day. He famous that the author’s room provides you the power to brainstorm with out taking out artistic controls, and that’s the core thought behind this writing assistant.

Moreover, the corporate is investing in making a blockbuster engine that may feed on insights from the platform about what exhibits have gotten successful.

The tip purpose of Pocket FM is to scale its catalog, provided that it’s producing some content material by itself and creating exhibits by its community of writers. However to scale and turn into extra widespread, it has to create hit exhibits.

“Blockbusters is what drives any content material platform. Whereas we’ve an excellent prime of the funnel with user-generated content material, it’s nonetheless a tough downside to identify blockbusters.”

Pocket FM has seen encouraging outcomes with its AI deployment. It has greater than 40,000 sequence on the platform with assist from AI by way of voice creation. Plus, the corporate has generated $3 million in income from them. Total, the platform clocked in $127 million in monetary 12 months 2024.

Essentially the most tough problem for the corporate is to strike the best stability of AI serving to creatives and churning out content material shortly. There may be all the time a threat of individuals utilizing AI to hurry up content material manufacturing and compromise high quality. Because of this, the platform turns into stuffed with mediocre content material, and it turns into difficult for algorithms to spotlight good exhibits.

Puneet Sharma, an India-based author and lyricist, identified that in a world the place a lot work is formulaic, artists could have an onus to show their genuine work.

Sharma added that AI instruments might help writers generate concepts and study completely different types. However which means that within the strategy of utilizing these instruments, the method of studying by failure may very well be misplaced.

Nayak stated that a few of its writers and creatives already use AI instruments. The concept for the corporate is to supply instruments with the context of tales and the platform.

Pocket FM has raised $197 million in funding throughout a number of rounds with backers together with Lightspeed Ventures, Tencent, and Instances Web. The corporate competes on a number of fronts with different content material gamers, reminiscent of Audible, Omidyar Network-backed Pratilipi and Google-backed Kuku FM.