Ten minutes at most, that's how long the daily podcast will last. And how nice is that; to listen to the 'highlights' of the day while cycling home from a day full of lectures? This makes it easy to stay up to date with the ins and outs of the campus, without having to read (sometimes long) articles.
AI Generated
Making a daily podcast has been on U-Today's wish list for some time, and was made possible by the innovation of Professor of Journalism Bart Brouwers (University of Groningen). With his company Innovation Origins, he developed Podcaist, an AI-generated podcast for newsrooms.
How does it work? We select some articles that were published on utoday.nl that day. Based on the content of these articles, a host and a guest discuss this: what is the core of the news and what developments lie behind it? The editors watch over the reliability of the podcast, and always do final editing on the script.
At U-Today, we see many opportunities in this form of podcasting. For us, it is especially important that we meet the needs of a young target group, who like to listen to podcasts. Listening to U-TodAI can also be pleasant for people with dyslexia or a reading disability. Or just because it's nice and fast, and you don't feel like reading so much after a long day of lectures or work.
English voices
Are there any drawbacks to the AI-generated podcast? Yes. For us, it's the somewhat mechanical voices. And then the AI voices sound better in English than in Dutch, which is why we only offer the podcast in English for the time being. In short, AI can do a lot, but not everything.
We hope you enjoy listening.
U-TodAI can be listened to from Monday to Friday, from 17:00, via Spotify and www.utoday.nl
