Welcome to the 10th 🥳 issue of 7 Weekly Wonders by Wondercraft. Today's highlights: A very special birthday, podcast listening experiencing a boom, improving voice cloning, and closing with a quote from a legend in podcasting, Michael Barbaro. 🎙️
A year ago, we started the Wondercraft journey to streamline audio production, by launching the Hacker News Recap podcast. Its rapid adoption early on pushed us to invest more in this area, and now, 365 episodes later, we're both proud and thankful to see it become a go-to source and one of the top tech news podcasts out there. Here's to HNR and to many more years ahead! 🥂
The New York Times is revamping its audio narration for articles. This week, 10% of users of the NYT’s site, app, and audio app will be able to listen to the automated narrations and the plan is to expand it to 100%. The main NYT app also has a new Listen tab, which includes podcast episodes as well as selected article narrations.
Edison Research just dropped a report after analyzing podcast trends for a year, and guess what? Podcast listening is skyrocketing, hitting its all-time high! There are some pretty cool stats in the report, so definitely give it a look.
4. Here's the scoop on what we've been up 🥣
- Now, you can translate any episode or track into another language with just a click! Dive into the crafting tip below to see how you can make it happen.
5. Here’s what’s coming next 👀
- We've been tweaking the voice cloning feature to get even closer to the original voice's vibe. Next week, we're rolling out two new features: one to nail the accent better, and another to amp up how similar the expressivity and intonation are to the original. Stay tuned for more details next week!
Looking to broaden your audience? You can now translate your episode with just one click. Check out this short video to see how simple it is.
7. Closing with a Wonderful quote
From the host of one of the most influential daily pods, The Daily
We are a show that really experiments quite a lot for a show of this scale, i think we prize the fact that we constantly try new stuff and are not overly worried about whether or not it might succeed immediately or not. - Michael Barbaro
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Stay creative,
Dimitris & the Wondercraft Team