AI tools are popping up constantly, and keeping up with them feels like a full-time job you never signed up for. Let's be real: if you're working on a podcast, your main focus is probably how you can tell a better story, not hunting down the newest AI tools.

But AI tools can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you—from transcribing your recording to cleaning up your audio, from creating your social-media clips to summarizing long research documents—so you probably don't want to ignore them completely. Here are five AI-powered tools that can make your podcasting workflow faster, smoother, and maybe even a little more fun.

Descript for end-to-end podcast production

Best when: You want a single production app with AI features at every step of the workflow, from recording to creating promotional clips.

Price: Free for starters, but to get the most of its AI you'll want a Hobbyist ($12 a month) or Creator ($24 a month) account.

There are a lot of AI tools out there that will do one, or a few, things really well. I've listed a few of them below. But to use them all you have to do a lot of file transferring—uploading, downloading—and you can easily find yourself paying for four or five subscriptions. What's great about Descript is it's got many if not most of those tools built in, so you can use AI at pretty much every step of the process.

The Descript team chooses its AI tools based on what it thinks is most helpful. And where there is more than one tool that can perform a task, they test them all to decide which is best. So they're basically doing the work of choosing the best AI tools for you.

Most of Descript's AI power comes from Underlord, its AI editing assistant. Here are some of the highlights:

• Transcription: Descript uses OpenAI's Whisper for fast, accurate transcription. And in Descript you can edit your podcast just by editing the text. That's not AI, but it's a great example of how an AI feature like transcription can work hand-in-glove with another technology to really streamline your workflow.
• Studio sound: If you or your guests don't have a good mic or aren't able to record in a soundproof room, this AI feature will instantly clean up the audio. It's incredibly powerful and liberating—I've found it lets me experiment more because I don't have to spend a bunch of time getting my studio set-up perfect. Even a quick recording on my iPhone can sound amazing.
• Regenerate. Descript was one of the first creative tools to use generative AI—it introduced AI voice cloning back in 2018. You can still use it, and now you can have it regenerate a piece of human speech to clean up mismatched tone or sudden bursts of background noise.
• Filler word removal: If you have a non-scripted podcast, chances are you and your guests drop a lot of "ums" and "uhs" and "likes" and "you knows" as you speak. Descript's AI will hunt them all down and edit them out in a few clicks.
• Edit for clarity: If your podcast is unscripted, this AI feature will find all the rambling parts and the stuff that doesn't advance the main storyline, and just edit it out for you. You can review its choices before they're cut.
• Remove retakes: If you have a scripted podcast and you sometimes have to say things multiple times to get them right, you can use this AI feature to cut all but the best takes, just like that.
• Automatic multicam: If you have a video podcast with multiple people on different cameras, you can use Descript's AI to quickly arrange your entire episode so the person talking is on camera. It's got nuance too—you can ask it to cut to non-speakers when someone is talking too long.
• Create clips: Making clips to promote your show on social media is no fun, especially after you've spent hours editing. So let this AI feature do it for you. It will identify the features most likely to perform well on social, clip them, and set them up so you can quickly dress them up for posting.

Best way to use it: Record, edit, and publish—in other words, for everything. That way you only need a single app to make your podcast.

How to get started: Record directly in Descript. Or drag your recorded file into the app. Either way you'll have a transcript in minutes, and be on your way.

Suno for AI-generated music that actually sounds good

Best for: Background music, intro/outro themes, and quick creative experiments Price: Free (10 songs a day, non-commercial terms), Pro Plan: $10 a month (2,500 credits)

Need music for your podcast? Suno is an AI music generator that creates full songs from a simple prompt. You can describe the mood, specify the genre and era, name instruments, and even set a theme to generate lyrics. If you already have lyrics, you can upload them, and Suno will build a song around them. Prefer an instrumental track? That's an option too. You can even upload your own audio, and Suno will generate a complementary song.

By default, Suno creates two versions of each song, about three minutes long, and the whole process takes less than two minutes. Once generated, you can extend the track if needed.

I tested it by creating songs for a sci-fi thriller I've been working on, inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray. I was surprised by how good the results were. I asked for progressive metal, and Suno delivered power chords, guitar solos, and complex rhythms. You can listen here: The Portrait's Curse by @ice_aggregate | Suno.

That said, Suno is best for background music rather than highly original compositions. It struggled when I asked for unusual genres or specific creative directions. It's not going to replace human composers, but for simple, on-brand music that sounds professional, it's surprisingly capable.

When to use it: When you need music that fits a specific mood or style, but it's not the centerpiece of your project.

When to skip it: If you need a truly unique, standout composition, hiring a composer or licensing music from an artist is still your best bet.

How to get started: Give Suno a topic, lyrics, or description, and let it generate your soundtrack.

Whisper for super-accurate transcriptions

Best for: Transcribing and translating spoken content

Price: Free (OpenAI API or integrated in tools like Descript)

If you've ever spent hours manually transcribing an interview or trying to decipher a muffled recording, Whisper might be your new best friend. Whisper is OpenAI's automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, trained on a massive 680,000 hours of multilingual audio. It's open-source, which means many platforms—including Descript—have integrated it directly. Whisper is a whiz at processing the audio signal, and can perform five main tasks simultaneously:

• Language Identification: It can identify the language being spoken from the nearly 100 languages in its dataset.
• Transcription: Speech to text in any of 96 different languages.
• Translation to English: Whisper can translate speech from any language into English.
• Voice Activity Detection: A fancy way of saying it can tell when you're talking. Voice Activity Detection can identify which parts of an audio segment contain speech and which do not.
• Timestamps: The model automatically adds text timestamps to identify any of the above.

The model processes audio in 30-second chunks and uses previous transcriptions to maintain consistency and build contextual awareness. This means it doesn't just transcribe blindly, instead considering the past context to improve accuracy.

What makes Whisper stand out? Its training data was messy on purpose, and included accents, background noise, and technical jargon, which makes it remarkably robust for real-world recordings. But it's not flawless. Its accuracy varies by language, so if you're working with a less common dialect, you may need a specialized tool.

It performs best in these languages, which have the lowest FLEURS Word-Error-Rate: Spanish, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, English, Polish, Catalan, Japanese, German, Russian.

While it's not perfect for every language, Whisper is one of the most powerful AI transcription tools out there, and for English tasks, it's tough to beat.

Best way to use it: Whisper shines with anything having to do with English: transcribing, translation, etc.

When to skip it: If you're working with less common languages, you may need to use a tool specific for that language, or hire a native speaker to help you with translation, transcription, or other tasks.

How to get started: Whisper is integrated in many different software options, including Descript, so it's easy to use straight from there.

Auphonic for automating audio cleanup

Price: Free for up to two hours per month, $11 a month for nine hours per month.

Got messy audio but no time (or patience) to wrestle with professional editing software? Like Descript's Studio sound, Auphonic offers a set of AI-powered tools that can automatically clean up your recordings and improve sound quality. The intelligent leveler makes sure that all speakers are equally loud, and balances the music to make sure you can hear any speech. The filtering tool instantly creates a higher-quality sound, even in multi-speaker recordings.

Beyond that, Auphonic automatically removes distractions, eliminating ambient noise, static, breathing sounds, and mouth noises with minimal effort. It also cuts out silence, long pauses, and filler words, helping your recordings sound polished and professional. And if you've ever struggled with reverb, Auphonic tackles that too. In my opinion, that feature alone makes it worth trying.

What I like the most, though, is the automation. You can apply any of their algorithms automatically, which is perfect if you have lots of interviews, recordings, or other audio files you need to work on. For instance, you can set a watch folder which allows you to process the audio whenever a new file is put into a folder on Dropbox, Google Drive, or SFTP.

It also integrates with Zapier so you can make your workflow even more sophisticated. This tool probably won't be the end of your audio process—it'll still need additional work, but it's a solid first step. For beginners, it can automate some of the standard parts of working with audio that can be challenging to execute in other tools.

If you want cleaner, clearer audio without spending hours tweaking settings, Auphonic is an easy, effective way to get there. But again, remember you can get basically the same thing—plus dozens of other AI tools—in Descript.

Best way to use it: Many podcasters use this tool to give a final polish to an already-produced episode.

When to skip it: Auphonic's algorithms are focused on speech, so it can struggle on audio that includes music, as well as intros/outros.

How to get started: Just drop your audio file into the web app and go.

NotebookLM for making research a breeze

Price: Free; you can upgrade for more notebooks and sources through Google One AI Premium.

For podcasters juggling research-heavy topics, NotebookLM offers an easy way to extract key insights without getting lost in the details. It offers a few cool features, like the ability to summarize, analyze, and search through multiple documents to surface specific information. Unlike basic keyword searches, NotebookLM aims to provide more sophisticated insights by letting you work with documents with prompts. I love it because it can handle a wide variety of source material:

• Google Docs, Google Slides, PDF, Text, and markdown files
• Website URLs or URLs of public videos on YouTube (it will use the transcript)
• Audio files (which are automatically transcribed)

If you're doing a lot of deep research, you know how eclectic your sources sometimes are. The NotebookLM feature one everyone is talking about is its ability to create an "audio overview," which essentially lets you turn anything into a podcast. See my article on it for more details.

While I'd doubt you would use the audio directly from there, it certainly makes it a lot more fun to tackle dense documents. Plus, they've also recently added interactive mode which lets you "join" the podcast and ask a question or direct the conversation, so you can get exactly what you want.

I've found that 20-40 pages is about the sweet spot for running the documents through the audio overviews. Any longer and the podcast does too much cherry-picking of the information that it will include, meaning that you will most likely need to scan the whole document to see what was missed. And any shorter, the information can be too drawn out and repetitive.

That said, there's a case to be made for doing the exact opposite: putting in tons of documents and seeing how the AI tool will fit it all together. Instead of limiting the input to a single paper or report, you can upload multiple sources—up to 50 on the free version and up to 300 on the paid version. This lets you see how the AI synthesizes information across different materials, and can surface unexpected connections, highlight recurring themes, or insights you might have missed.

Best way to use it: Give yourself an interesting summary about a document. When to skip it: Despite its claims, its analysis of long documents leaves a lot to be desired. You need to either use one short source or pack in tons of documents and let the AI sift through it.

How to get started: Pick your boring report and put on your headphones, and let NotebookLM generate the rest.

Cleanvoice AI for templating your standard audio fixes

Price: Free for 30 minutes; there is a pay-as-you-go plan or monthly subscription starting at $11.

Cleanvoice AI is designed to automate tedious audio cleanup tasks, including background noise removal, cutting filler words, and eliminating unwanted sounds. It also automatically removes long pauses and dead air, which can save a ton of time compared to manual editing, especially when dealing with recordings that might otherwise be unusable.

For multilingual podcasters, Cleanvoice AI goes a step further: it removes filler words in over 20 languages, making it a great option for cleaning up multilingual recordings without extra hassle. Another useful feature is customizable templates: you can save your preferred settings and apply them automatically. For example, if you want to keep natural pauses and hesitations in a conversational podcast but remove them in a more polished production, you can fine-tune Cleanvoice AI to match your workflow.

Beyond cleanup, Cleanvoice AI offers text-based tools like audio summaries, transcriptions, and key takeaways, helping listeners get a quick overview of your content. Many of these tools exist in Descript, but you could use both: Cleanvoice AI also lets you export timelines for seamless integration into other editing software. While it won't replace a full editing suite, Cleanvoice AI is a great addition for anyone looking to save time on cleanup and focus on storytelling.

Best way to use it: See if it can help save otherwise messy or unusable audio.

When to skip it: Most of its features are available in Descript, which has many more, and which you can get for roughly the same cost.

How to get started: Upload your audio and let Cleanvoice AI save you time editing.

Time for AI to do the heavy lifting

Podcasting is an art, but it also comes with a lot of technical heavy lifting. Between editing audio, sourcing music, transcribing interviews, and organizing research, there's a lot of work that goes into each minute of that final cut. That's where AI tools can make a real difference. They can help you clean up messy recordings, generate original music, transcribe multilingual audio, or turn dense documents into digestible insights, saving time and energy so that you can focus on what really matters: telling a great story.

The best part? You don't need to overhaul your entire workflow to take advantage of AI. Just start with one that solves a real problem for you, and see how it fits into your workflow. You might be surprised at how much time (and frustration) you can save.