Ever since Google introduced the “Audio Overviews” feature into its NotebookLM research tool, I have been experimenting with feeding it bodies of text that I did not want to sit and read: stereo instructions, Wikipedia rabbit holes, my Q1 performance review, etc.

With this AI tool, two uncanny valley robot voices are generated to “dive deep” into any documents I upload — adding metaphors, puns, and even casual banter to a summarized conversation. Click play, and what you’ll hear sounds a lot like a stereotypical podcast.

After a few Audio Overviews into my week, I realized I was taking significant time away from listening to podcasts made by real people. And as a podcast producer, this was both alarming and fascinating. 

I hate to admit how impressive Audio Overviews is. It organizes topics in segments the way a real podcast would, and it brings in outside context to help you better understand the subject material. I generated a podcast from a Spanish paella recipe I found online, and the hosts made note of the difference in rice texture between paella and risotto, without risotto specifically being mentioned in the recipe. 

Like every AI product I’ve ever used, you have to be careful with the accuracy of the content — it does have issues with hallucination. I uploaded notes from a story I was working on, and the AI hosts made up fictional quotes from my sources that were nowhere in my document.

What makes Audio Overviews unique within the AI world is it isn’t necessarily about saving you time. The hosts frequently vamp for a few minutes before getting to the important stuff (that being said, very similar to a real podcast). 

Director of product at NotebookLM Simon Tokumine tells me this casual format is by design. Initially, the product was very quick and efficient with information, until the team heard feedback from outside of Google.

“It was only when we started to actually share what we were building with others and get feedback from people who aren’t necessarily obsessed with making every second of their day as efficient as possible, but are more into leaning back and listening in and just kind of going with a wave of information, that we realized there were two different populations we were building for here,” Tokumine said. “And the population we were building for was not necessarily Googlers.”

Watch our full video to see my journey testing out Audio Overviews and my conversations with Simon Tokumine, Vulture podcast critic Nicholas Quah, and our own podcast producers here at The Verge.

Oh, and here’s an Audio Overview of that video.

I’ve been told to either throw tapes away when they get contaminated or open up a VCR to run a makeshift cleaning process. The latter solution is cumbersome, though, and risks damaging both the VHS and the VCR.

For VHS collectors, the mold situation has been a growing concern. And it’s what led Tony Crouch, of VHSisLife.com, to build his own solution for cleaning VHS tapes.

“If you had a really moldy tape, there was mold flying everywhere,” Crouch told me about existing cleaning methods. “I just finally decided there had to be a better way. So I sat down and started figuring out designing what I would want for myself, for a tool that made it easier to clean mold off of the tapes.”

The VHS mold cleaner is a fairly simple machine. A 3D-printed case holds two spindles each attached to a motor, where you place the VHS spools that were taken out of the VHS shell. The analog tape is strung along a post holding a cleaning pad, which grabs the mold and other unwanted particles while the spindles are transferring tape to each other. A directional switch dictates which way the spindles move, and a control knob adjusts the speed of the motors.

Cleaning a fairly moldy VHS tape I had from the 1990s took about 25 minutes front and back, including reassembling the cassette. The efficiency made my $140 purchase seem like a small fee considering I was now able to easily preserve some home movies I’d saved from my family’s basement and get them into a condition to be digitized.

What’s also notable is the ability to attach a vacuum to the cleaner for sucking up the mold that falls off the tape. Holes in the machine allow particles to fall into the 3D casing, where the vacuum will remove those particles by connecting to a large hole in the back of the case. This is a feature I have not seen on other methods of cleaning old tapes.

Once the VHS collectors community caught sight of the tape player, Crouch was inundated with hundreds of orders and at one point had 300 people on a wait list. So far, he has shipped over 600 units of the machine after initially announcing it for sale in May 2024. “It is something that I just do here at home as I have time and source all the parts, and try to keep the cost down, keep it affordable,” Crouch says. “I do it as what I feel like is a contribution to the VHS community.”

After many requests from customers, Crouch has also started selling 3D-printed spindles for Betamax, VHS-C, 8mm video, DV video, and other analog video formats, which has made the machine even more accessible for lower-budget cleaning. The cleaner has appeared in the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives Instagram page and has made its way to several universities and museums for archival projects.

The VHS cleaning machine is coming at a critical point in the life of the format. Not only is mold a factor, but after about 25 years, VHS drops in quality due to the magnetic particles separating from the tape. So far, the mold remover machine has saved a few home memories from my own collection, and according to Crouch, saved a bunch of others for his customers. Whether he planned for it or not, the VHS cleaner has turned Crouch’s hobby into a business that serves a niche community, and he’s even started thinking about possibilities for a second version.

“At the end of the day I just want to see as many tapes and home memories, whether it’s a Friday the 13th or your kid’s birthday, let’s keep it out of the trash and keep it for years to come.”

In 2024, podcasts have gotten closer to becoming a video-first medium. Though video podcasts have been around a relatively long time, shows from The New York Times, NPR, and many other podcast networks that have been audio-only for years have recently started adding a video component in order to gain new listenership. In fact, Spotify, a major player in podcasts, is about to begin paying podcasters to bring videos to the platform. 

And after years of producers trying to get audio shows to go viral on social media, podcasts are now dominating TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts after video producers realized they can just film the talent talking. Meanwhile, weekly podcasts are looking to attract younger audiences who grew up on YouTube. As a result, video producers are figuring out how to make podcasts, and audio producers are figuring out how to make videos.

I’ve noticed a few developing trends in this video-first podcasting format. This isn’t surprising; when one producer discovers a formula that works, others are going to try it. Let’s take a look at current design and tech trends — and then I’ll talk about what I think may develop over the next year or so.

Home design

Many of today’s podcast studios look like living rooms and basements. This isn’t a new phenomenon with talk shows, but a lot of podcasts started out in a living space, and larger media companies have adopted that aesthetic. Lamps. Fireplaces. Fake plants. Bookshelves. This environment gives a more “laid back” style of long-form interviewing, which is typically the vibe of most chat-style podcasts.

Couches and comfy chairs show up a lot on these video shows. The round table has been ditched, and leisure is key — it’s a lot more comfortable of an environment for talking hours at a time. Both hosts and guests are often on a couch together or sitting in comfy chairs separately. 

Another trend I’ve noticed are these wooden slats on the wall in podcast studios — our own Vox Media space has gone with this design as well. These work better for sound absorption while still looking like a living space. This is already looking to be a signifier of mid-2020 video podcasts. 

With wide-shot camera angles showcasing the entire room, there is usually something in the middle of the screen, like a TV or a giant logo of the show, to create a symmetrical studio look. Neon signs and colored lights are very trendy right now because they add a colorful glow to a more muted studio space. Lots of cursive lettering.

Branding is often prioritized in video, and most producers think that means literally looking at the logo for two hours. This is also an easy way to let a TikTok scroller know what show they are watching (though this typically doesn’t crop well for vertical video).

More attention to tech

Microphones are often placed on floor stands that extend over the couches (these articulating boom stands have been staples in recording studios for decades). As a result, the stands often appear from out of the camera frame and stick up broadly in front of guests’ faces awkwardly. Poles sticking out at various incongruent angles look even messier when you have multiple guests on separate chairs. 

Though new kinds of mic stands for podcasts have been introduced to the market, many shows are ditching the long, awkward boom poles in favor of having hosts and guests hold their microphones instead. This feels a bit more authentic and intimate onscreen, and many stand-up comedians prefer this method. However, it can get a bit awkward with inexperienced guests who talk with their hands or who don’t know how to hold a microphone with a narrow polar pattern. 

It can get even worse. When podcasts are audio first but with a video component, you often see awkward practices caught on camera, like this instance where each guest is holding their phone up to their face to record their audio while looking directly at the viewer. This is a common practice for radio interviews but isn’t great when video is involved.

The Shure SM7B microphones are still really popular in this medium as well as the budget MV7 model. For the purposes of branding, cubes with the name of the show are often stuck awkwardly on the bottom of the microphone. This is reminiscent of microphone flags on newscaster stick mics, and they are now being retrofitted for these classic radio studio microphones. This is likely because it’s more effective branding on vertically cropped videos than a big logo on the wall in a studio.

Big isolating headphones are common in radio and podcasts and are still used in a lot of video versions. But when guests are remote and are looking directly at their webcam, those large ear cups stick out very awkwardly — more so than if you’re looking at someone’s profile view. 

So that’s what a lot of video podcasts have looked like through 2024. But how about next year?

The future looks more professional

I believe that, in 2025, podcast producers will eventually stop following these tropes and try to differentiate themselves. Some producers that were hired to help make the transition to video will start questioning the reason for the large headphones and thick microphones covering people’s faces and opt for smaller lavalier mics and in-ear monitors. 

New audiences may start to forget about the word “podcast” and refer to the chat shows they watch as just “shows.” Media executives will try to opt for syndication of the programs on linear platforms like Roku, Pluto, or Tubi. The thin line between podcasts and TV shows will get thinner. 

More consumer-priced tools for production have entered the market, basically turning a simple desk setup and a MacBook into a fully stocked control room. Hosts are already moving out of the studio and into barber shops, tennis courts, and on sidewalks. AI tools like Descript, Hush, and Accentize can turn less-than-optimal microphone recordings into fuller, beefier broadcast-style recordings. Podcasters whose equipment is less capable of handling uncontrolled recording environments will especially benefit from these postproduction tools. 

And who knows? Perhaps the pendulum will swing back again when budgets for these shows become too costly to keep a video show running multiple times a week without a strong following. Maybe they will even scale back down to an audio-only format. And perhaps that is where they will restart a new experiment in the audio medium. 

Cassette tape sales are at a 20-year high, the vinyl market is on a 17-year growth streak, and CDs have caught the attention of Gen Z. After a resurgence of retro physical media, tech companies have now jumped in to provide new hardware to play these formats.

Companies like We Are Rewind, Fiio, and others offer updated designs for new cassette and CD players, with some additional functionality like USB-C charging and Bluetooth.

But after a quick glance at these updated music gadgets in person, we found that they are seemingly not as advanced as some of their vintage counterparts. The dimensions of We Are Rewind’s Bluetooth cassette player are roughly the same as Sony’s first-ever Walkman from 1979 — but by the time the cassette Walkman ended its initial run in the early 2000s, cassette players were practically the size of cassettes themselves. Fiio’s DM-13 Bluetooth CD player has a large square design that resembles a Sony Discman from the late 1980s, even though, by 2001, we had super slim round CD players from iRiver, Panasonic, and Sony with enough anti-skip protection to make it through an entire album.

Look at these new players compared to its vintage counterparts

So, what happened to the compact designs we took for granted in the early 2000s? For The Verge’s YouTube channel, I talked to the companies making these modernized players — We Are Rewind and Fiio — to figure out why we can’t make cassette and CD players like we used to.

Keep watching for a hands-on review of these gadgets compared to cassette and CD players at the height of the technology.