Welcome to the most useful AI podcasting assistant yet: Captivate Spark AI, the brand new module available to all Captivate podcasters.
This will change your podcasting life in a big way. Fully integrated AI help during every step of the podcasting process – all done the Captivate way that you know & love.
Watch the reveal video here:
In this article...
What is Captivate Spark AI?
Captivate Spark AI is a fully integrated AI assistant, offering as much assistance with your podcast as you’d like. We’re giving you the tools to drastically reduce the time spent in your podcasting workflow and to make your audience growth, podcast discoverability and creator marketing easier than ever before.
What can Captivate Spark AI do for you?
Captivate Spark AI is not only the most advanced podcasting AI tool out there, it’s the most Captivate AI tool out there. That means inventive, intuitive features that you didn’t know you needed, making your life easier in ways you never expected.
Cut your podcasting workflow in half and generate more attractive episodes!
Automatic transcription
When you enable Captivate Spark AI for an episode, the first thing it will do is transcribe your audio file for you. You can select the number of speakers to make sure it’s accurate, and it’s super easy to edit the transcript directly within Captivate right away.
Transcripts are great for podcasts because they make them more accessible, and infinitely more searchable, making your show a whole lot more SEO friendly. Plus, Apple Podcasts now supports transcripts right out of the box!
Attention grabbing episode title suggestions
Spark AI will analyze your audio file and suggest catchy, SEO-friendly, clickable episode titles for you. There’s also the ability to provide extra, contextual information you’d like Spark AI to consider when suggesting your titles.
Episode show notes and other episode-level suggestions
Spark AI will then analyze your file and suggest:
- An intro summary
- Up to 3 versions of show notes options
- Key takeaways from your episode to use on social media
- Chapter breaks, titles, and their timestamps
- Complete SEO assets for Google, YouTube & more
You can then select which of these options you like, click them and immediately pull them into your normal episode workflow. It couldn’t be quicker or easier!
AMIE + Captivate Spark AI
Dynamic ad & content insertion is becoming more familiar to every serious podcaster; AMIE, Captivate’s dynamic content engine, is the best around and of course, we had to make sure that AMIE had a part to play in Captivate Spark’s AI reveal!
When publishing an episode, Captivate Spark AI will
- Analyse your audio
- Suggest suitable ad breaks based on your content cadence, relevant talking points and natural, contextual breaks in conversation
- Allow you to instantly add AMIE ad slots to your audio timeline with one click
No more forgetting to leave a suitable ad or promotional break in your content, Captivate Spark AI will do it for you!
Accelerate your audience growth with podcast episodes that hit the mark for your listeners, every time
Not only can Spark AI help with your day-to-day admin, it will actually help you with creating new episodes, analyzing what’s working with your show right now and spotting trends in your niche that you can capitalise on.
New episode suggestions
When enabled, Spark AI will look at what your podcast is all about, what you’ve already covered and who you’ve interviewed, and will then suggest what you should do next. Never again will you be stuck for what to talk about in your next episode.
Guest suggestion
Spark AI will look at who you’ve already spoken to and research interesting and emerging figures in your chosen niche, and use this information to give you ideas as to who you should be inviting on your podcast next. It will even give you some questions to ask them, too.
Trend analysis
As if topics and guests weren’t enough, Spark AI will analyze your recent episodes analytics, alongside wider research, let you know what topics are particularly popular at the moment and give you ideas of what to cover in your next episode.
Already have a topic idea and just need a hand building an episode?
By giving Captivate Spark AI the basis of an idea, it will go ahead and deliver you with a fully formed episode plan, including guest suggestions, talking points and more!
Artificial intelligence that is unique to you
Artificial intelligence is everywhere in podcasting right now. But most of the time, it’s simple executions with little thought for you, the creator, and the voice that your audience has come to know, love and support.
We’re big believers that AI should work alongside you to help to take the load off, but that it should be as seamless for the listener as possible.
Introducing: Captivate Spark AI persona training
Now, you can make AI work with you more closely, by teaching Captivate Spark how you speak and write. And, because every podcast is different, you can set this tone-of-voice training at the show level, ensuring that each of your podcast is perfectly tuned to its own brand voice.
You can teach Captivate Spark AI how you’d like the following:
- Writing tone of voice
- The narrative perspective you’d prefer
- The humour level & type you’d like
- How simple or complex you’d like your generated assets to be
Heck, you can even give Captivate Spark AI some blog posts that you’ve written, and it’ll learn from those and write your content in a similar style!
Cost
We wanted to keep this as simple and cheap as possible for you at all times. The only aspect of this that costs us money is the transcription – so that’s the only thing that costs you any money.
To cover our costs, we’re going to charge for transcription at $1 per hour.
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Reading Time: 2 minutes In this free upgrade, all Captivate podcasters can now exclude episodes from their RSS feed AND set auto-expiration dates on episodes!
So, if you have a one hour podcast, it will cost you $1 to use Captivate Spark AI for it.
Everything else, all of the other amazing features we’ve discussed above, are completely free – if you’ve spent $1 on a transcript, you can use everything else.
A monthly fee of $5 per month gives you five hours of transcription that rolls over each month if unused. For any additional ad hoc top ups, you can purchase one-off blocks of 5, 10 or 15 hours that remain on your account until used.
If you’ve got earnings from Captivate’s subscriptions and tipping features, you can convert them to Spark Credits for free, completely bypassing the Stripe fees.
Looking to the future
This is just Spark AI Phase 1, remember – we’ve got new modules in the works already, so keep your eye on what we’re doing next!
Designer’s Corner: Layering UX and coming up with a unique visual direction
Hey podcasters, Garry here. I’m the Head of Design at Captivate and I wanted to give you a few words on how we approached the UX for Captivate Spark AI and the unique visual language for our new AI feature.
We’ve been talking about the possibilities of AI within Captivate for years now and so when we felt it was the right time to offer it to our users, my design goal was clear: create something that felt intuitive and natural within Captivate’s existing ecosystem while enhancing the creative workflow of podcasters.
A thoughtful approach to branding
After a few rounds of iteration, we settled on the name Spark AI as we wanted a term that conveyed both energy and inspiration. “Spark” encapsulates that moment of creativity, that initial burst of ideas, and we felt this beautifully mirrored what AI can do for podcasters—illuminating their work by reducing the time spent on routine tasks so they can focus more on creativity. The goal was to position Spark AI not as a replacement for human creativity but as a tool that gets users’ from “I’ve got this idea” to published episode faster and more efficiently.
In branding, we wanted Spark AI to feel like a natural extension of the Captivate suite. This led to a visual identity that remained cohesive with our overall platform but introduced a sense of futuristic innovation. The bright, electric tone in the colour palette and the minimalist lightning bolt iconography embody the quick, transformative power AI brings to podcasting. Our MD, Mark Asquith, was drawn instantly to this version as the dashed half of the semi-circle represented the “generating content” part of the feature.
Spark AI’s palette sits nicely within Captivate’s existing colour palette and anytime you interact with Spark AI, you know instantly and instinctively that you’re doing an AI-powered function, rather than the other usual actions you already use within Captivate. Plus I like the colour purple.
Seamless integration into the Captivate Dashboard
The UX/UI implementation was important for us in making sure podcasters could use Spark AI effortlessly, without feeling like they were navigating a new tool altogether. In our recent Dashboard 2.5 release, we spoke about how our new side drawer made it easy to access content and actions for speed and convenience, so when it came to playing with the best way for Spark AI to be integrated into the workflow, we knew it was a no-brainer. It enabled us to layer on another level of UX that was necessary for dealing with AI-generated content while also sitting nicely within our current, in-situ UX. Our users are already familiar with it so it made adding the various AI features come together nicely.
Key design takeaways:
- Familiarity: Instead of creating a separate tool that users need to learn from scratch, Spark AI functions directly within your existing workflow. This means podcasters can access AI suggestions without ever leaving the platform.
- Simplicity: Spark AI needed to feel intuitive. Podcasters can access AI-driven features in just a few clicks, whether it’s simply generating a transcript, populating show notes, generating episode summaries, or suggesting your next guest.
- Control: While Spark AI offers suggestions, you always have the final say. We designed it to be a collaborative partner, providing suggestions that users can accept or tweak. To help with this, we put together a series of options for you to steer those suggestions to better suit your personality and brand. Select a pre-built persona or customise your settings for individual tone, writing style and more.
I hope you enjoy using Spark AI in your day-to-day podcasting workflow. Not just the amazing (and frankly, freakishly good) back-end technology that powers the content, but the speed in which you can get AI content into your episode and the cool little visual touches that progressively enhance your experience.
Thanks podcasters,
Garry
Next steps
Read about Captivate’s other huge features, like our in-house monetization tools and our unmatched dynamic ad insertion technology!
