We’ve been fighting a while to keep AM on the dial. Especially when you go buy a new car. Some of the newer vehicles don’t even have FM, so you have to pay, no matter what to get radio with human voices. These are generally electric vehicles and are the base level, so they’re going for an entry level consumer, while not allowing that entry level consumer to not pay for the addition of broadcast radio.

But let’s not forget about the audience going for AM radio still. The Local Radio Newsletter reports you can make money off this demographic. They report there’s been a change from the 50-plus crowd. And more good news for those of us humans who use our voices to make a living, they say as there’s more AI-generated content pumped out, many mature folks want good old fashioned, local “brick-and-mortar” media for accountability. People tend to trust, real, local voices. Go figure.

I always thought the robot sound was a major turnoff. Even on Sirius XM’s Lithium channel, they’ve been using a robot voice for imaging forev. I can’t listen. While some of that music is from my day, as the kids say, every time that voice comes on, I’m outta there. 

While the corporate overlords may think it’s great to save money because they can expend human positions, listeners don’t appreciate it, they are their friends and community memebers. According to Google, anyway, a simple search will show you, audio listeners and streamers relate to humans over phony voices. 

As a matter of fact, our client, the University of Florida’s Journalism and Communications Dept. studied whether people could discern human from A.I. Students and scholars used a short weather forecast and polled other college students online. Their results showed a human newscaster felt more credible than the robot. They also did the same with news, and got the same response, but did say both were found to be highly credible. 🤖