The Washington Post introduced Your Personal Podcast, an AI-powered customisable audio briefing available to registered users on its mobile app, developed through a multi-year agreement with AI voice-generating software company Eleven Labs. In three rounds of internal testing, between 68% and 84% of scripts generated by the feature failed a metric intended to determine whether they met the publication's standards, yet the company proceeded with the launch. Four Washington Post staff described mistakes in personalised podcasts ranging from minor pronunciation issues to misattributed or fabricated quotes and inserting commentary, such as interpreting a source's quotes as the paper's position on an issue.
Users can choose to listen to an AI-generated podcast that selects and stitches together roughly four top stories based on their reading and listening history, with two AI hosts taking turns summarising news stories in a more casual tone than a straight news briefing. The project took about six months to complete, with users able to customise the podcast through prompts including topics, duration and AI voices. The company's product review team recommended moving forward with the release, saying it would continue to iterate through the remaining issues with the newsroom and would label the tool as a work-in-progress that could generate errors, with a Washington Post spokesperson stating the product is currently in beta. Post head of standards Karen Pensiero wrote that the mistakes have been frustrating for all of us, whilst another editor noted that it was a particularly poor time for the Post to produce shoddy content, given scrutiny from the Trump administration. One in five podcast consumers say they have listened to an AI-narrated podcast, according to Gabriel Soto, senior director of research at Edison Research, which tracks the podcast industry.
The Washington Post described the podcast format as a broadening product to expand its journalism beyond its core audience, especially younger, more diverse audiences who may be looking for more engaging ways to get their news. Inception Point, an AI podcast company that has generated 200,000 episodes of content featuring over 100 AI personalities, has garnered 400,000 subscribers across Apple and Spotify, according to the LA Times. Craig Robertson, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, stated that one of the main things constantly found in research is that news and personalisation do not go together, as people do not want to feel like they are in a bubble.
Sources:
1. https://digiday.com/media/the-washington-post-debuts-ai-personalized-podcasts-to-hook-younger-listeners/
2. https://www.semafor.com/article/12/14/2025/iterate-through-why-the-washington-post-launched-an-error-ridden-ai-product
3. https://www.semafor.com/article/12/11/2025/washington-posts-ai-generated-podcasts-rife-with-errors-fictional-quotes
4. https://www.npr.org/2025/12/13/nx-s1-5641047/washington-posts-ai-podcast
