Chris Messina

Bespoke, by Trellis — Generate a custom podcast with AI

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Interested in learning more about something? With bespoke, you can create bite-sized podcasts at the press of a button, courtesy of AI host Matilda! Enter a topic, choose from ideas, and vote on your favorite. Every day, the fan-favorite is shared on Spotify.

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Jasmine Wang
Bespoke is Trellis' first experiment in custom media & entertainment experiences powered by AI. In the future, I'm excited about a world where we're able to reference high-quality sources like books, podcasts, & beloved websites (while also directing traffic back to those same creators for the long-form original content), & social curation of your bespoke library by the friends + community you learn alongside with. Would absolutely love feedback from folks on what they'd like to see more of from a product that creates custom audio experiences. We'd love bespoke to become a product that you use everyday to generate a custom daily digest on the topics you care about. Please share what you make! We'd love to listen to podcasts people generate! We're publishing the most upvoted generated podcast every day as an episode in our "Hall of Fame" Bespoke podcast. You can subscribe to that podcast & listen here: https://open.spotify.com/show/7D... Thank you all for trying this out!
Evan Stites-Clayton
This was such a fun project to be a part of building. I love imagining a world where we can all get exactly the content we want, pumped into our ears and perfect for us. There's so many topics I want to learn about through an Audible book or podcast type experience, but there's often not a perfect match for me to listen to. I can't wait to see how this evolves and I'm curious to ask how you are thinking about generating longer form content? Seems like the podcasts are all about 2 or 3 minutes right now but I want to go deeper on subjects.
Jasmine Wang
@the_esc Yay! It was so fun collaborating. Imagining the experience to be *actually* 100% customizable essentially through natural language (the power of LLMs!) or interaction with your calendar (e.g. fitting into your free time slots); definitely at minimum would allow users to specify any length. We put this in place for cost reasons & as a free prototype!
jeremy h
@the_esc @jasmine_wang Yes it'd be so cool to have longer-form podcasts, especially ones that are well-grounded in the relevant material. E.g. if I could listen to a 1-hour podcast on what Deleuze might have thought about climate, or a 1-hour podcast on Nietzsche and Buddhism. Or an even simpler and more seamless experience - I'd just tell the app how long I have to listen at a given time each day (e.g. 45 mins), and with its knowledge of what I'm interested in, it just generates a podcast that I'd like.
Alessandro Solbiati
I used to always ask my google home to read me out wikipedia pages to hear someone talking to me about my topic of interest - this I feel is the product I have been looking for a long time ! I love the originality and creativity of the trellis team - always shipping and always passionate about education/learnings/books! Excited to be part of this journey <3 go team
Evan Stites-Clayton
@alessandro_solbiati1 Love that you were using google home to read you wiki pages, that is super similar to what we are going for here.
Daniel Schreiber
This is really cool! I made a few podcasts https://www.readtrellis.com/besp... & I'd love to be able to add in data sources so that the information was more trustworthy.
Evan Stites-Clayton
@daniel_schreiber1 oooooh Love the idea of being able to add information sources, that's really smart and not something that we thought about as far as I know. Just gave your Marvel podcast an upvote :)
Ryan Hoover
This space is fascinating. Historically content has been primary "created and pushed" but gen AI is enabling a new form of "pull and create" where users can summon the type of content, stories, and media they want to consume. @mariogabriele has a good post on this called Endless Media.
Evan Stites-Clayton
@mariogabriele @rrhoover Love the Pull and Create. This was actually very similar to what allowed Teespring to succeed as a commerce platform - rather than a create and push for products, it moved things more into a pull model and that saturated a bunch of unmet market demands.
Keyur Ahuja
@mariogabriele @rrhoover Great article Ryan...it's going to be a surreal future...Great time to be alive. Here is one more fascinating read on the topic that I read a while ago: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinio...
Robert Cunningham
Cool project. I wonder whether generating and voting on the postcasts you *want* instead of the podcasts you have (a la Reddit) will become more typical over time?
Evan Stites-Clayton
@infinitydeltax great questions. Did you generate one? Would love to see the link :)
Ashley Wen
LOVE this - I'm especially such a fan of the podcast including three versions - transcript + key takeaways + audio, which not only makes the entire experience way more accessible, but also adaptive to different learning preferences / dispositions. Question: I love being able to pick how long the podcast is - curious what's 'left out' when the podcast is shorter. Is the content just more high-level, or does it just focus on a salient aspect of the topic? Suggestion: I'm curious if you've considered doing podcast series - content breakdown into sections. I.e., if the topic is quite broad, the user might be able to select how many sections they'd like the content broken down into / time for the sections, and that way the content could almost be more 'modular' / buildable. I'm also interested to see what the social curation will look like. I'd love to be able to ask questions too and for community-moderated experts to be able to answer, and/or to be pointed to a 'follow-up' podcast that might further my learning. - All in all, I'm so excited for what y'all are building!!! I wish I had this option in school, and would've loved this as supplemental learning about topics I was more curious about or didn't feel like I fully understood in a traditional classroom setting.
Evan Stites-Clayton
@ashleywen Wow, I feel humbled by your amazing feedback and thoughts here. The AI pretty much decides what to include or not for hte shorter podcasts. We decided to start with a focus on shorter content because it is faster to generate, but in the future with streaming we'll be able to offer longer form stuff. 100% I want to explore the direction of creating series. One thing we are imagining is that you could even decide while listening what direction you want the podcast to move in out of a series of options.
Ashley Wen
@the_esc Very cool. I'm glad to see from the comments that I'm not the only one excited by longer-form content! As for series, love that idea of an interactive option! Suggesting future content based on what you've just listened to. I am so excited for how that could spark the joy of learning in kids (aren't we all kids :) If/when you do do series, I'd also love seeing series-building that emulates learning paths / guided learning. Sounds like a lot of incredible things are in the pipe. SO cool.
Evan Stites-Clayton
@ashleywen yay thanks can't wait to share the next steps with you.
Lars S. Laichter
A wonderful product. This is one of the best uses LLMs that I have seen so far.
Evan Stites-Clayton
@lars_s_laichter Aw thanks so much for that feedback.
Mathurah Ravigulan
So excited about this!! Really impressed with this new medium the trellis team is diving into, and it's so cool to see user-generated audio to create bite-sized podcast snippets of the topics they're interested in learning more about.
Evan Stites-Clayton
@mathurah_ravigulan1 What did you end up creating? Super curious to see everyone's podcasts if you feel comfortable sharing the link.
Arielle from Peko
stunning!!!!!!
Evan Stites-Clayton
@arielle_from_peko thank you on behalf of the Bespoke crew :)
Arielle Lok
can't stop listening wahoo!!!!!!
Evan Stites-Clayton
@arielle_lok1 What are you loving? Send links plz :) :)
Nicolle Valladares
This is a wonderful product, i’m super proud about it !
Evan Stites-Clayton
@nicolle_valladares woooooo hooo so good to collaborate with you
Lydia Hylton
This is so cool! As a person who consumes at least an hour of podcasts a day, I often have to wait through a bunch of content I find irrelevant in static podcasts. I love the idea of being able to learn about new topics in any time frame while walking my dog! Very cool product!
Evan Stites-Clayton
@lydia_hylton What topics are you most interested in learning about?
Siddharth Pandiya
Love this so much! The fact that the top comment is about the need to implement vote limits 😂 can’t wait to use this to learn more about the Roman Empire :)
Evan Stites-Clayton
@pandiyasid Can you send a link to the podcast that you made? Would love to check it out :)
Anna Wang
This is so cool! It's lightning fast at generating, too. I used it to learn about how humans shifted from hunting & gathering to agriculture.
Evan Stites-Clayton
@anna_wang5 Interesting topic! Would you be down to share the link to your podcast? I want to listen and upvote you on Bespoke haha.
Nicole Shum
great product for a common pain point of content discovery. your friends can refer you to great media but ultimately personalizing the experience especially to topic AND time is incredible. (as long as the content is generated in a tone/style you prefer. i find that even the narrators voice for audiobooks makes a huge difference for me)
Evan Stites-Clayton
@nicole_shum1 What tone / style do you find yourself preferring? Is there an existing podcast that you really like listening to?
Christine Hong
Super interesting! So curious to see where you plan on taking this next.
Evan Stites-Clayton
@itschristinehong One of the big next steps would be to generate custom length podcasts and for that to work we need to build a better prompt chain for building out compelling longform content.
Luba Yudasina
this looks really cool, congrats trellis team!!
Evan Stites-Clayton
@lifeofluba Thank you so much for the support @lifeofluba :)
Ghost Kitty
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Evan Stites-Clayton
@servelogy_technologies what are you launching soon?
Irene Yu
Woah, this is incredibly cool! Congrats to the team!
Evan Stites-Clayton
@iamireneyu thanks Irene :)