How to Use AI to Generate Questions for Podcast Episodes

On the latest Ask a Creator Economist episode, we answered Sarah's question on using AI to generate questions for a corporate podcast she produces. This turned into a broader conversation on how podcast hosts (and other creators) can work with AI. As this might be interesting to many of you, we asked our ACE Intern* to turn our conversation into a blog post (* an AI Intern, that is).

As a podcast host, coming up with interesting and relevant questions to discuss can sometimes be a challenging task. This is especially true if you produce multiple podcasts for corporate clients, like Sarah. So, how can you use AI to generate questions for your podcast episodes?



Using AI to Generate Questions & Topic Ideas

There are several AI tools that can help you generate questions and ideas for your podcast episodes, such as ChatGPT and Notion AI. However, it's important to keep in mind that you need to treat these tools as interns that just joined your organization. You need to tell them what to do, not expect them to think for you.

To get started, provide a detailed prompt that describes the topic you want to cover and the tone you want the questions to take. Specify the subject matter that the questions should relate to, the context of the podcast, and any other relevant details you can think of. You can even describe the persona of the question sender, such as an engineer or a marketing person.

Be specific in what you ask for and expect that the AI tool will deliver a first draft that you will need to review and fine-tune. You may need to rewrite some questions, add more context, or change the end goal of the question to ensure that it's relevant to your target audience.



Using AI to turn documents into questions

Another way to use AI for your podcast episodes is to summarize documents and turn them into questions or . On the original ACE episode, for example, we assumed that Sarah's clients might have some product documents for the sales teams. There are AI tools available, such as ChatPDF, that allow you to upload a PDF and ask for a summary or key questions related to the content. This can help you to turn existing documents into conversational topics.



Conclusion

In conclusion, using AI to generate questions and topics for your podcast episodes can be a useful tool to save time and help you come up with relevant questions. However, it's important to remember that AI should be treated as toolkit that needs to be used competently and whose output requires fine-tuning. Also, you need to remain the final arbiter of which questions and topics are relevant to your target audience. By using these tools and approaches, you can create engaging and informative podcast episodes that keep your listeners coming back for more.



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