This site has a podcast, and this week the podcast is about the podcast. Meta, yes. It is also the most honest advert on the site, because everything it claims, it demonstrates while claiming it.
Two synthetic co-hosts, David and Lily, discuss one Journal article per episode. David did the reading and brings the numbers. Lily attacks the numbers until only the sourced parts survive. They are voiced by ElevenLabs' v4 model, the same two voices every episode, because the voices are the brand: her British directness against his American precision, so you always know who is talking.
The show exists for one reason before any other. Reading is not available to everyone. Some visitors are blind, some are neurodivergent, some just have their hands full. Every article on this site now has a spoken version, and the article is the transcript. Nothing to install, no platform account, just audio and an RSS feed.
Making an episode looks like this. A script is written from the article, with every figure kept identical to the text. The dialogue is rendered in chunks, then every chunk is transcribed back and matched against the script turn by turn: anything below 85% word coverage is re-rendered, and anything that still fails is rendered line by line until it passes. Nothing ships unverified. The intro sting is mixed under the opening words, the episode is levelled for podcasts, and it goes out as an MP3 with a self-hosted feed.
That pipeline is short, and I did not build most of it. The voices are ElevenLabs' research made usable. The assembly is FFmpeg, a volunteer open-source project that has been quietly carrying half the internet's media for decades. The glue is Python, the feed is RSS, an open format older than some of my readers. The episode scripts and the pipeline code were drafted with Meta's Muse, an AI coding assistant, and argued into shape from there. One person in Suffolk can make something that used to need a studio, and nearly all of the leverage came from other people's generosity. Thank you to all of them.
Here is the part that matters if you run a small business. This whole website is a portfolio of ideas. The chat assistant that answers from my own writing, the podcast you are hearing about, the scheduler, the journal itself: each one is a working answer to the question of what is possible now, at a budget a small business can actually hold. None of it is a mockup. All of it runs here, today.
So the call to action, stated plainly. If spoken content would suit your business - articles your customers could listen to instead of read, a voice for your documentation, a conversation where you currently have a brochure - contact me. There is a form on the front page, and a schedule page if you would rather book a call. I will show you what it could sound like with your words in it.
