Build a custom podcast generator in 5 minutes

The podcast industry is mature. There are shows on every topic from sovereign debt restructuring to competitive barbecue. And yet most professionals who follow niche domains find that no podcast exists at the intersection they actually care about. Not "AI" broadly — but AI applied to supply chain logistics in pharmaceutical manufacturing. Not "fintech" — but the specific regulatory environment around embedded finance in the EU.

The reason is economics. Podcasts are created by humans who have to justify the time and audience for each episode. Niche cross-domain topics can't sustain a human-produced weekly show. But they can absolutely sustain a machine-generated daily briefing for the one person who cares about exactly that intersection.

That's what a custom podcast generator is: not a catalogue you choose from, but a production pipeline you define and run against your own sources every morning.

What "generator" means and why it matters

The word "generator" is doing real work here. Most podcast apps — Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts — are delivery systems. They take episodes that humans produced and put them in your queue. The creation happened elsewhere, by someone else, for an audience they imagined.

ListenBrief generates. Every morning it produces an episode that did not exist the day before, from sources you defined, covering only what those sources published since the last run. The episode is original content in a literal sense — it was written by the AI for this generation, for you, from the inputs you chose.

This has a consequence: you have 100% editorial control over the scope. You decide what's in scope (your source list) and what length the episode runs (5, 10, or 30 minutes depending on plan). The AI decides what's most significant within that scope and how to structure the narrative. You're the editor-in-chief; the AI is the producer.

This also means the podcast doesn't exist as a public show. It's private by design. No one else hears your episode, and your source list isn't shared. Enterprise plans can enable team briefings or white-label delivery to an audience — contact us for those configurations.

Setup: what it actually takes

The generator is built to be usable without technical skills. Here's the setup sequence:

1. Create your account at listenbrief.com. The 7-day free trial requires no credit card.
2. Add your sources. Paste a URL into the source field. ListenBrief auto-detects RSS feeds — for most websites, pasting the homepage URL is enough. For YouTube channels, paste the channel URL. For newsletters, paste the Substack feed URL (format: https://[author].substack.com/feed).
3. Choose your episode length. 5 minutes for a tight daily briefing. 10 minutes for a thorough roundup. 30 minutes for an in-depth synthesis across many sources.
4. Select your voice (Pro and Power plans). Preview and pick from available AI voices.
5. Done. Your first episode generates tomorrow morning.

The whole process takes about two minutes for a basic setup. Adding more sources or refining your setup takes another minute or two. You can iterate — add a source, see how it affects your briefing, remove it if it's not valuable.

For developers who want programmatic control: Pro and Enterprise plans include full REST API access and an MCP server. You can trigger briefing generation, retrieve MP3s, manage sources, and integrate with your own pipelines. Full documentation is at developer.listenbrief.com.

Source limits by plan

Starter plan allows 3 sources total — enough for a focused briefing on one domain. Pro and Power allow unlimited sources, which is necessary for cross-domain synthesis or tracking a large number of publications. Power adds deep intelligence mode, which performs cross-source analysis rather than treating each source independently — useful when you want the AI to identify connections and tensions between what different sources are saying.

Enterprise adds team sharing: multiple users can share a source list and each receive their own briefing, or receive a shared team briefing. This is the configuration used by teams who want everyone starting the day with the same market intelligence.

See also: RSS to podcast for technical details on feed handling, AI podcast API for developer integration, and the developer portal for API documentation and SDK reference.