Podium Review: Is it the best AI writing tool for podcasts?

There is no time like the present to start integrating AI into your podcasting workflows.

There are a wide variety of AI-powered tools out there that directly target podcasts and podcasters with a view to simplifying workflows and streamlining the way that we produce shows. Podium is one of these solutions aimed specifically at the marketing side of the podcasting world.

If you’re on the fence about using Podium, you’ll find our honest review and overview of whether it’s worth investing in or not here.

What is the podium AI tool for podcasters?

Podium markets itself as an AI copywriter that can ‘supercharge your podcast’. It delivers all kinds of automatically generated custom written content for your show:

• Show notes
• Blog articles
• Transcripts
• Chapters

Podium’s biggest selling point is the time that it can save you. Rather than manually composing written copy and content for each episode – or hiring someone to do it for you – you can rely on or work with Podium to create it quickly and seamlessly.

Podium pricing and plans

Here’s a quick breakdown of how much it costs to use Podium:

Free Trial

You get 3 hours for free to try Podium and see whether you like working with it.

Creator

Price: $12 per month (on a yearly payment plan), $14 per month (on a monthly payment plan) for 3 hours per month. Note that pricing increases if you want to add hours.

Features:

• PodiumGPT which creates custom text content for your show
• Show notes
• Chapters, chapter titles and chapter summaries
• Episode title suggestions
• Quotable moments highlighted
• English transcript of your podcast
• Keywords
• Social media posts

Studio

Price: $178 per month (on a yearly payment plan), $213 per month (on a monthly payment plan) for 50 hours per month. Again, pricing increases if you add hours.

Features:

Same as the Creator plan.

Enterprise

Price: Custom pricing. Contact Podium directly to get an idea of how much this plan costs.

Podium key features

Let’s take a look at Podium’s key features and how they work. This will give you a better sense of how Podium might fit into your existing workflow:

Show notes

A fully written summary of your podcast episode. This gives your audience a quick overview of the main points that the episode covers, the kinds of questions and topics you address and the overall flow of the episode. Your shownotes are typically combined with chapters and key takeaways.  

Chapters

Podium automatically identifies your episode’s chapters or segments, creating titles for each. This helps your listeners navigate quickly to specific sections or get a brief idea of what the episode entails.

Transcript

A full transcript of your episode that’s completely searchable. You can download in .TXT which is good for repurposing into blog articles  and .VTT formats for subtitling. Podium can transcribe in English, French, Spanish and German.

Highlight Clips

Though you can’t create the highlight clips directly in Podium, it can tell you the timestamps of the best moments from your episode. It’ll automatically highlight the best quotes for you to browse.

Social Media Posts

Besides show notes and chapters, Podium can also generate AI social media posts. You can post these on any social media platform including YouTube

Keywords

Podium will generate a list of keywords relevant to your episode and show. You can use this to help you boost your content’s performance and ranking on search engines. Search engines analyze your content to find where to place it, so by including relevant keywords you’re likely to show up where your audience is.

PodiumGPT

Podium GPT is essentially a podcast-oriented version of ChatGPT. Leveraging the power of ChatGPT, this tool creates all kinds of written content specific to you and your podcast. This helps you go beyond Podium’s native features. You can use it to ideate and brainstorm new content ideas or generate additional marketing materials.

Podium Pros and Cons

If you’re still on the fence about whether Podium is the right tool for you, here’s a breakdown of what we consider the tool’s biggest pros and cons:

Podium Pros

• Easy to use. Podium is a niche product for podcasters. This means that its tools, features, and interface are made to fit into your existing workflows easily.
• Varied content output. Podium offers more than just show-notes and chapters, you also get access to a podcast transcript, social media captions, and even keywords to help you with your SEO efforts.
• Web-based for easy access to your tools wherever you are. This means that you don’t have to be on your own device to access your content.
• Can upload either audio or video files. This flexibility is key to accommodate all kinds of content creators.

Podium Cons

• Subscription price is tied to a fixed number of hours. This may mean that you end up having to pay more for additional hours.
• AI-generated content isn’t always perfect. Podium is definitely a smart solution for your writing needs, but AI-generated content isn’t always 100% accurate. This means you might find you’re still spending time editing – or rewriting – the content that Podium produces for you.
• Not multimedia. Since Podium focuses exclusively on written content, you don’t have the ability to work across mediums. Meanwhile, with tools like Riverside, you have access to AI transcription, summaries, and chapters, as well as a seamless editor and automatically generated video clips from your full recording.
• Separate software. Podium is another add-on to your software setup. Other platforms like Riverside allow you to keep everything from recording through to AI-written content in one place.

Podium walkthrough: How to use Podium for your podcast

In this section, you’ll find a breakdown of how you can get started with Podium:

Step 1: Once you login, you’ll land on a page that invites you to upload your podcast audio file. You can also upload a video file.

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Step 2: After uploading your audio (or video) file, Podium will instantly start generating all your written content: a transcript, titles, show notes, chapters, keywords, highlights, and PodiumGPT. You can track the progress of each type of written content on the right-hand side of your screen.

At this point, you also need to fill out your personal information to help Podium individualize your experience.

Step 3: On filling out your personal info, Podium will take you to your dashboard’s ‘Status’ page. You may find that you need to wait a while for all the written content to finish processing.

Step 4: Once a type of content has finished processing, you’ll be able to view it. You can do this directly from the ‘Status’ page or from the panel on the left-hand side of your screen.

Is Podium worth using?: Podium Alternatives

Podium definitely fulfills a need. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s the best or right tool for you. There are quite a few alternatives to consider:

Riverside

Riverside is a browser-based remote recording studio that also offers a powerful range of AI-powered editing and copywriting tools, just like Podium. Riverside makes high-quality remote recording a core part of your workflow. You can record audio and video, edit your full-length recording, and create marketing materials all within the same interface.

Here’s an introduction to Riverside’s main features:

• High-quality local recording: Record in up to 4K video and 48kHz audio.
• AI powered editor: Edit with text-based editing, an intuitive video editing timeline, and automated audio enhancement.
• Multitrack recording: Capture each participant’s video and audio on a separate track, making editing easier.
• Local recording: Every person’s video records on their own device instead of relying on unreliable internet connection.
• AI transcriptions: Download highly accurate transcripts, available in 100+languages
• AI summaries: Get automated podcast show notes, descriptions, chapters, and key takeaways all at the tap of a button.
• AI clips: Try Magic clips which turns your recordings’ highlights into short shareable videos.
• Captions: Add automated captions to your videos and style them as you like.
• Remote recording: Record with up to 10 participants, on desktop or mobile.

Riverside pricing:

• Free
• Standard - $15 per month
• Pro - $24 per month
• Enterprise - get in touch for pricing information

Riverside vs Podium

Riverside is an all-in-one tool. With one subscription, you get access not only to a powerful browser-based recording studio, but to a whole range of  AI-powered features.  This means you’re able to easily edit your podcast and get support in creating all the written materials you need. Podium is a more focused tool that exists to help you with your podcast’s written content and nothing outside of that. Overall, we’d say you’ll get far better bang for your buck using Riverside.

Start recording with Riverside

Easily record high-quality podcasts & videos remotely

Get Started

Swell AI

Swell AI pitches itself at a very similar level as Podium: an AI writer for podcasters. It’s aimed at helping podcasters build ‘content pipelines’ for their shows and even lets you manage multiple podcasts from the same dashboard.

• Integrates with Dropbox, Google Drive, RSS and more
• You can manage multiple podcasts from the same dashboard
• ‘Highlight and clip’ feature highlights what the AI thinks are the best moments from your recording. You can also pick these out manually from your podcast.
• Generative titles to help you get inspired when titling your episodes
• AI-generated show notes include a show summary, timestamps, and key topics
• Ready-made social media posts: Twitter (or ‘X’) threads, instagram captions and LinkedIn posts
• Blog posts related to your podcast and written in the tone of your show. Automatically formatted for maximum readability and SEO performance.
• Supports over 100 languages
• Ability to import pre-existing podcast episodes and revamp their written content (show notes etc)

Swell pricing:

• Hobby - $0 per month
• Starter - $17 per month
• Enterprise - Get in touch for pricing

Swell vs Podium

These two platforms are objectively very similar: offering an easy solution for your podcast’s written content work streams. Podium is slightly more affordable than Swell at the most budget-friendly level, coming in at $12 per month rather than $17. On balance, though, the features on offer are fairly similar so the choice will most likely come down to which software fits better with your workflow.

FAQs on Podium Podcast Review

What is Podium software used for?

Podium calls itself an ‘AI copywriter’ for your podcast. It offers automatically generated written content for your show ranging from show notes, articles, episode transcripts and chapters and more. Essentially, you can see it as a writing assistant that will speed up the creation of essential marketing copy and text that goes alongside your podcast.