Carl Robinson is the CEO and Co-Founder of Rumble Studio, a SaaS tool that enables businesses, content marketers, and podcasters to create audio content in much less time than it’s currently possible using asynchronous podcasting or interview system.
Rumble Studio is the first and only company to record asynchronous guest interviews using conversational A.I. This makes the process fast and simple and allows anyone to create more audio in less time, no skills required.
Carl Robinson is also the host of the Voice Tech Podcast and has interviewed more than 100 experts in the field of voice technology. Earlier in his career, he has led a product team at a chatbot startup, founded two other startups, and became a published voice AI data scientist.
His ambition is to democratize audio content creation so that everyone can establish a presence on the audio channels of the future, and dreams of a future where we can communicate naturally with machines.
Carl is British, but he left the UK in 2009 and lived in China for 7 years, before moving to France in 2016. These experiences have had a profound impact on his mindset.
Enjoy today’s podcast episode from Startup Stories, and let yourself be inspired.
You can listen to the full podcast or watch the video version below:
NOTE! The full interview and content are available only in audio or video form. The followings are snippets from the interview podcast that were edited for clarity and brevity.
How did you get to launch Rumble Studio?
Carl Robinson: I started by being an individual podcaster. I launched the Voice Tech Podcast while I was doing a master’s degree and doing my internship.
So, I was working a lot on my own in my lab, building machine learning models. It was a solo effort, so I thought I’ll launch a podcast at the same time to raise my profile and speak to the people around me.
It was a good excuse to pick the brain of the experts and learn more about the field. But then I quickly discovered that podcasting is a lot of work. It really takes time to do a good job of podcasting.
You need to research, get the guests, record, edit, publish, and market. After so much work, you start thinking about outsourcing work, monetization, and selling things on your podcast. It’s kind of like a snowballing effect.
I was talking on my podcast with experts in conversational AI, smart speakers, and similar things like talking to machines. This is how I put the two things together, that maybe I could use this cool technology that is accelerating very quickly and solve the problem of podcasting.
This is where it all came from. It was the pain I felt needed to be solved.
Fast forward, after joining an accelerator, I and my co-founder created Rumble Studio.
Tell us about Rumble Studio and asynchronous podcasting?
Carl Robinson: Rumble Studio is essentially a system that uses asynchronous guest interviews. The reason for asynchronous is because it’s a stepping stone toward the automated, natural, spontaneous interaction between humans and machines.
That was the vision for Rumble Studio, but the technology was not there, so it needed to be built. This is part of the reason why Rumble Studio exists.
The core building block of a machine to be able to talk to a human is this asynchronous system that we have built and is now live.
How does it work exactly?
Carl: The creator or the podcaster sets some questions upfront and puts them into Rumble Studio. Then you get a link to send it to your guest. It could be one guest or one hundred guests. You can email them the link or even put it on social media or a website.
Anyone who clicks that link goes through the questions as you set them. The guests record their answers and can re-record if they make a mistake. When they are happy with it, they move to the next question, and so on. It’s like a questionnaire but for audio capture.
How should startup founders approach podcasting?
Carl: Startup founders should not underestimate the value of personal branding or the value of audio branding for their company. Audio is probably the most authentic medium that you can choose to communicate with your audience.
And so, I think it’s great on a personal level for a founder to have that voice heard and for a startup to have that presence on the audio channels of the future.
Podcasting is now as hot as it has ever been, and the growth we experience is significant. This won’t slow down over the next few years. The investing in podcasts keeps going up.
If you are not in the place right now to have a podcast, it will be soon, so it makes sense to start now, make your mistakes early, and become established.
What do you see happening in this marketplace?
Carl: I see the world of podcasting, audio content, or voice technology, another sleeping giant I think converging. The killer app on smart speakers is content. It’s so convenient, and it happens on the phone, in the car, or wherever you can’t physically touch a device.
The number of voice requests goes up as people are speaking with machines more and more and asking for what they want as opposed to typing it.
Brands and companies, in general, will need to have audio content that can respond to those requests.
When someone is asking about your company, you don’t really want Google to recite the top lines from Wikipedia. What you want is for your CEO or communications marketing people to have ready to respond to that.
This is why I think it will go from a nice have to an absolute must-have in the coming years.
The full interview and content are available only in audio or video form.
Cristina Imre – The Founder Coach That Takes Your Success to Heart!