How Podato works

Podato does two different things with your show, and it helps to know which is which. It reads your feed, which is quick and costs nothing. It processes an episode, which is the deep read that everything Podato writes is built on.

Reading your feed

When you add your show, Podato imports your RSS feed. It creates an episode in Podato for every episode in the feed, with its title, date, artwork and description.

It also reads what you've already written: your episode descriptions and show notes. That's the first thing Podato learns about how your show sounds on the page.

Your titles and show notes name your guests too, so Podato lists them in Guests before you process anything. See Where your guests come from.

Reading the feed doesn't use up anything on your plan.

Processing an episode

Processing is the deep read. Podato takes one episode's transcript and pulls out everything worth keeping: the quotes, the topics, the people, the questions asked and the ideas worth coming back to.

Everything Podato writes for that episode is built from that one read: the title ideas, the feed description, the show notes, the promos and the social posts. The notable quotes come straight from it, word for word. That's why you can ask for a new version of anything without Podato reading the episode again.

Each episode Podato processes counts towards your plan's allowance, unless your feed already includes its transcript. See Plans and limits.

What Podato processes on its own

Podato works through your episodes from the two years before you added your show, and every one since, newest first. Without you pressing anything, it processes:

• Any episode whose feed includes its transcript. These are free and never count towards your plan.
• On the Grow plan, past episodes, from Grow's back-catalogue allowance.

Neither uses your monthly allowance. That's for the episodes you pick yourself, like a new episode with no transcript in its feed, or one from further back. See Plans and limits. An episode's card says Processed once it's done, and Not processed until then.

What Podato learns, and from where

Podato builds up a picture of how your show writes. Each thing it knows comes from one of these places, and later ones win:

1. Sensible defaults for your kind of show.
2. The details you give it when you set up: your show's name, hosts and goals.
3. Your feed: the descriptions and show notes you've already published.
4. The web: what's publicly written about your show.
5. Your episodes: every episode you process teaches it a little more.

Every setting Podato learned shows where it came from, so you can tell a guess from something it read in your episodes. You can change any of them, and your answer always beats what Podato learned.

"Voice" means writing, not audio

When Podato talks about your show's voice, it means how your show writes: the words, the tone, the spelling, the things you'd never say. It doesn't clone or imitate anyone's speaking voice. The only thing it ever does with your audio is transcribe it into text.