Headstreams now makes its own podcast, and this week it’s been landing every morning.
Reading is still the main event for me, because I like long-form. But a lot of my tech news comes through podcasts these days, so I thought I would turn my streams into something I can also listen to on the way to work, before I sit down to read. It was also a good excuse to play with voice AI, which I hadn’t properly tried yet.
The first version was a single narrator reading out the day’s top articles, and it got irritating fast. It’s unnatural to have one person talk at you for that long, and I think better when I hear an argument and the counter-argument than when I hear a summary. So now it’s two hosts who argue, one for and one against.
A few things make or break it:
- Debates need a sharp claim. Gemini reads the newest articles in a stream and picks the single sharpest thing worth arguing about. “Who wins from AI regulation?” is too broad to argue about, but “the big labs will turn the cost of compliance into a moat smaller competitors can’t cross” is something two people can properly disagree on. It also brings in a few older pieces I’ve already read, so the hosts can build on what I know.
- It’s all in the script. ElevenLabs does the voices, but it can only perform what it’s given, so most of my time went into the script, and it took a fair few rounds to make it sound like a conversation instead of two essays read out loud: short spoken sentences, the odd interruption, hosts who are allowed to concede a point, and a ban on words like “moreover” and “furthermore”. Each episode ends on where the disagreement actually lands, and what would settle it.
- Voices need loosening. Out of the box, the voices sounded a bit like newsreaders, so I turned the stability setting down, which makes them more expressive, and added a touch of style. Each line also gets sent with the lines either side of it, so the intonation carries through the back and forth instead of every turn starting cold. And since it’s making ten-minute episodes, I went with ElevenLabs’ faster, cheaper model over its top one.
- Quiet weeks are fine. An episode only gets made when a stream has at least ten new articles, three of them strong, and it’s been a week since the last one. For something that’s meant to save me time, staying quiet when there’s nothing worth arguing about feels right.
So far I’ve found it a nice way to get my head into a topic before I read about it, but it’s still a little stilted, so I’ll probably have another stab at it when I get a bit of time.