Radio in a Radio-less World
WBEZ Chicago on Voice Platforms
Continuous Listening — Radio Applications That Listen To You
This year WBEZ began daily publishing of our audio to “Your News Update” on the Google Assistant. When you say play the news to any device with the assistant enabled, you’re given a personalized playlist of the latest news from a variety of world, national and local publishers. The stories in your feed are chosen right at the instant you ask for the news — taking into account your location, user history and preferences, as well as the top trending news stories of the day. Moving from short one-topic items to longer listens, on the experience today you can catch brief updates from WBEZ reporters, feature stories from our newsroom and segments from our other productions like “Curious City,” or WBEZ’s daily talk show “Reset.”
This isn’t our first venture into smart radio, but it is the first time our stories can be heard in this kind of mix, side by side among such a wide array of different news sources. An item from us could be followed by the latest segment from the AP, Reuters, CBS, Marketplace, WBUR, KCRW… the list goes on.
Google has been working directly in partnership with news publishers for more than two years in prototyping “Your News Update” for their voice assistant. News makers involved in the product’s development have licensed their stories for playback on the experience, with the team at Google News taking publisher feedback, adjusting and modifying things along the way.
We’ve started referring to these automated playlisting experiences as Continuous Listening Applications (CLAs). Our audio has been available through this kind of CLA playback for some time now on many platforms, most recently on Alexa through NPR One’s play the news experience. WBEZ stories and segments on the Google Assistant are just our latest foray into smart radio.
Making our reporting and storytelling available through continuous listening is now a fundamental part of station daily production workflows. Our involvement in this news product is helping WBEZ to find new audiences, and is integral in our station’s efforts of being right where our listeners want us as their habits and use of technologies change.
Get The Latest When You Need It — How We Show Up
Each weekday WBEZ news audio on-demand offers:
- 8–10 short news items, running under 1 minute
- 1–3 featured news stories of the day, typically at 4 minutes
- 4–6 longer segments from our talk show “Reset”
This year so far, our station has logged over 750,000 plays on “your news update”, over 3.5 million minutes of audio played back for users of the Google Assistant. With NPR One in 2020 thus far, our station audio has been played nearly twice as much.
Mornings and afternoons, typically within an hour of airing on the live broadcast, these segments are pulled from our automated airchecks. As soon as broadcast recording completes, we take the 44.1 kHz/16 bit stereo wav file containing that segment off our internal servers, clip it out from intro to outro, and occasionally make minor edits for on-demand continuity or add some light compression for loudness adjustment. We render that to a typical mp3 file standard of 128 Kbps, 44.1 kHz/16 Bit Stereo, between -14 to -16 LUFS.
That item is then uploaded to RSS feeds maintained on an SGrecast audio CMS from our media hosting partner StreamGuys, and distributed accordingly. The agile audio CMS framework we have on the SGrecast system allows us to service multiple platforms with our stories from one location. Google’s algorithm for “your news update” can pick up any item from the feeds we’ve licensed as soon as they’re uploaded, throwing them into the various playback mixes of thousands in the Chicago area and elsewhere.
Previously, distributing on-demand audio stories and segments was the job of our website, WBEZ.org. Surfacing that audio elsewhere like NPR One required a full web story build-out containing that audio. The result was inconsistent publishing cadence to native listening platforms. The responsibility for getting audio up online could vary — from the web editor — to the reporter — to whoever on staff with CMS access could get it done on time. This practice often meant variance in things like formatting and quality control of our news audio, and it muddied the accuracy of our play data. To publish our digital audio comprehensively and with consistency, while taking advantage of every listening opportunity available to us, we positioned supervision of this work under a new role in our product department.
Producers from our midday talk show “Reset” were also investing production time clipping out single-topic standalone segments for their web page, a limited listening opportunity for us on digital — where users primarily visit for a reading experience. Training producers on the show in how to use our SGrecast system allowed us to publish these segments faster and more consistently to native listening platforms.
The result is that we have standardized audio hosting, analytics, file formatting, tone, loudness, titling, image assets and the like. Now audio cut from our clocks and fed to SGrecast serves every platform we’ve prioritized under the station’s goals. We’re taking advantage of everywhere our digital audio can be, whether on our website, NPR One, Alexa, Google Assistant — the list will continue to develop.
Digital Radio Gets Smarter — The Road We See Ahead
In the past, when it came to news audio on-demand, our first concern was making the listen available on articles for our website. But even then, the most substantial listening to our stories wasn’t happening through WBEZ.org on mobile or desktop. Unsurprisingly, when shared to listening platforms like NPR One, our stories were generating far more impactful engagement.
Right now the most playback for on-demand digital audio from WBEZ news happens on smart speakers and over smartphones. Those are the more familiar devices where people interact with a voice enabled AI like Alexa, Siri or Google’s Assistant. Increasingly, that engagement with AI is also happening elsewhere — like over televisions, wearables, even office equipment. Likely the most threatening place of all — particularly for radio broadcasters — is in the car.
Continuous listening applications are now what’s top of mind when we think of news audio on-demand, given that (separate from our 24/7 livestream) they’re the most effective means by which our reporting is currently delivered over voice assistants. As a result (through our work on CLAs) our reporting can be on every device with voice assistance.
So if the drivetime listener instead starts asking their assistant to play the news each day — ignoring that radio preset to WBEZ 91.5FM — we’re still there for them.
As of January over a third of U.S. adults were using a voice assistant at least once a month in the car, according to a report from VoiceBot.Ai. Just before CES 2020 around the same time, Google shared that more than 500 million users were calling on their assistant just as often. We expect to see trends like this continue.
Where people are interacting with voice assistants is developing just as rapidly as how they’re able to use them. Now more than ever, people are looking for the latest news. More of them are looking to find it through voice platforms. Since we’ve been in the throws of the COVID-19 pandemic, smart speaker users have increasingly been asking their voice assistant more often to deliver the latest information. This trend further emphasizes the importance of our efforts here to provide local news in this space.
Our participation in Your News Update gave WBEZ an opportunity to think strategically not only of our presence on smart speakers — but comprehensively about voice platforms, as intelligent assistance integrates further into our daily interactions with technology. What we’re doing now isn’t revolutionary, but it certainly required a lot of refactoring in our approach to distributing audio for news.
From here is where we begin to innovate.
New content opportunities lie ahead of us. We’re beginning to move beyond simply making radio refit the format, and are developing material with the on-demand listener first in mind.
This fall, users on voice platforms will be able to catch daily news briefings from WBEZ produced originally for digital, where we’ll offer a brief look at the latest headlines for the day in a way that’s distinct from (the reliable yet more temporal) radio newscasts. Our “Chicago News Update” will build further momentum for our station in this space by providing insights that will inform our future development of custom smart speaker skills and voice assistant actions.
We’re looking at an open field of platforms we can extend our content to that are innovating in their own respect, like Spotify offering a mix of news updates with your favorite music on “Your Daily Drive.” Playlisting experiences like this are core to listening platforms, and we’re experimenting internally with how WBEZ can build useful playflows ourselves for users. Better listening experiences are within reach, and part of the road ahead will be integrating much of what we find success in for our mobile apps.
To establish a sonic identity for WBEZ on voice platforms that presents our essence and values our station is also currently developing an audio brand signature, which you can look forward to hearing soon at the top of our news updates and stories.
Recent efforts with voice platforms in mind have led to improvements in WBEZ’s digital experiences across the board, but we’re even more excited about what’s in store as we begin to catch our stride. Today we’ve renewed our focus in making our audio stand out everywhere it can, and I believe that positions us for success as listening audiences look beyond the broadcast for local news.
J Kyle White Sullivan is Audio Product Associate for WBEZ Chicago. He curates audio produced by the content teams at Chicago Public Media for the voice and smart speaker space — Google Assistant’s “Your News Update,” NPR One, Amazon Alexa and other emerging listening platforms.
