Is Castmagic Worth It For Podcasters? (2023)
It’s great to go back and focusing on Podcasting for a while. After our popular posts on How to use ChatGPT as a podcaster, and the review of Swell AI, we got many questions and feedback about trying Castmagic. It’s an AI-toolkit for podcasters that is meant to save them a ton of time when creating show notes, bios, and transcriptions. Let’s have a deep dive!
[Updated as of November 2023: I started testing out new features from Castmagic and was pleasantly surprised by them. Really love how easy it is to learn the Castmagic interface, beautifully designed, minimum yet powerful.]
Castmagic Review (2023)
Castmagic is an AI-powered podcasting tool that helps you create show notes, transcripts, and other content from your audio recordings. It is a cloud-based platform that is easy to use and can be accessed from anywhere. Castmagic is a great way to save time and improve the quality of your podcast.
Video Walkthrough
Key Features
Castmagic offers a variety of features that can help you improve your podcast. Let’s have a look.
1. Transcription
Castmagic can automatically transcribe your audio recordings into text. Nothing new here, just like many other tools that do audio transcribing.
2. Show notes
One of the fundamental parts of publishing a podcast episode is show notes. Castmagic can rapidly generate show notes from your audio recordings and transcript, including links to any resources that you mentioned in your episode! That’s great, I spend dozens of hours adding those links myself!
3. Speakers and Guests Bios
This one is big. Castmagic can generate bios for your guests with a few clicks. The bios will include information about your guest’s background, experience, and expertise. Of course, you’ll need to be careful about their names in case there are people on the internet with the same name. Don’t just copy and paste, make it personal!
4. Key Topics
With Castmagic, it’s easy to identify the key topics in your audio recordings, which can be great for creating summaries of your episodes and for promoting your podcast on social media.
5. Quotes
The tool can extract quotes from your audio recordings, that you can use to promote your podcast on social media and to create marketing materials.
6. Magic Chat
Interestingly, Castmagic provides a Magic Chat feature. It’s a chatbot that can help you with your podcasting needs, answering your questions, providing tips and advice, and helping you troubleshoot any problems that you may encounter.
7. Pages
I also love their new feature called Pages which allows you to use up to 5 recordings to draft long-form, editable content. Similar to Magic Chat, you can use Pages to generate content from a prompt that you come up with. Unlike Magic Chat, Pages uses many recordings as context, uses GPT-4, and allows you to edit your results.
Castmagic vs Swell AI
Swell AI and Castmagic offer similar features. But I generally find Castmagic’s upload to be faster, and the interface easier to adapt. They both have a chatbot feature that allows you to search from within the recording.
Pricing
Castmagic offers a variety of pricing plans to fit your needs. The plans start at $39 per month and include a free trial.
- Hobby: $39/mo. Includes 200 minutes of transcription per month.
- Starter: $99/mo. Includes 500 minutes of transcription per month.
- Rising Star: $299/mo. Includes 1500 minutes of transcription per month.
All plans include unlimited transcripts, show notes, bios, key topics, quotes, and Magic Chat. The Hobby plan is limited to one show, while the Starter and Rising Star plans allow for multiple shows. The Rising Star plan also includes API access and agency support.
| Plan | Transcription Minutes | Shows | API Access | Agency Support | Free Trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby | 200 | 1 | No | No | 15 minutes |
| Starter | 500 | 1 | No | No | 15 minutes |
| Rising Star | 1500 | Unlimited | Yes | Yes | 15 minutes |
Conclusion: Is Castmagic the best Swell AI alternative?
I’m pumped to see all these tools come out. Most podcasters just want to focus on podcasting, and they don’t have the resources to scale to a 6-person team to edit and publish the show. I didn’t have that option, I had to do everything myself.
Castmagic’s AI-powered tools can help podcasters save a ton of time, improving the quality of their podcast, and reaching a wider audience. The transcription, show notes, and bios features are especially helpful.
Compared to Swell.ai, Castmagic is a solid competitor. Since both offer a free trial period, I’d highly recommend trying them all and seeing which one is better tailored to your needs and workflow.
Until next time, keep rocking!
Fei
Have feedback or comments? Feel free to reach out to me via Facebook or Linkedin at anytime!
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