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Welcome back to Flash Briefing February. It is day three and today we're going to be speaking about how Flash Briefings work. My name is Cooper I am analyst and broker technology for for various companies including standard who provide news for Google Assistant over in the US and also vixen labs which is a company over in Shoreditch, which works with brands and businesses to create voice experiences. And I'm here today again with my partner invoice. Peter Stewart.


Absolutely. So I do. I'm a broadcast journalist been working in and around radio for a while more years, frankly, than I care to remember but not enough to give me a nice enough pension to leave at the moment. And as well as working in radio and a little bit of TV as well. I've also written extensively several books on radio and TV production. So when smart speakers came along and skills And Flash Briefings, I thought to myself, there's an idea here to get into because this is joining several of my passions, about radio, about content about production, about creativity, and also a little bit of tech as well. And Suze's will come to the tech about how Flash Briefings work in a few moments time. But tech also is something that you're interested in is that you are a bit of a self proclaimed kind of a techie geek yourself you're, you're really interested in voice and skills and always.

Exactly, and that's actually what got me into this as well. It was the techie side of it. I wasn't Can I just wasn't satisfied with owning a smart speaker. As a broadcaster. I had to work out how I could get my voice coming out of it. And that's what started me on the journey of Flash Briefings really, you know, and Flash Briefings are these mp3 files. You know, everybody knows about these audio files, little compressed mp3 files that basically, you record yourself, and then upload to a podcast host. And that is how you get your Flash Briefing to work on to the smart speaker. So it all sounds a little bit technical, but it really isn't is it pizza is just about choosing a provider so that you've got somewhere for the Alexa dashboard to all your content from. Absolutely. Now,

you could actually put all of your audio for Flash Briefings on your own website, a lot of people have got their own website at the moment. You know what actually, to be quite honest, that's more trouble than it's worth because it does take a bit of tech and a bit of know how I know quite a bit of time to make sure that your audio is going to be in the right place that Alexa can retrieve it. You've also got to check things like bandwidth as well. And you know what, for the small price of a podcast host is much easier just to upload it to a system which is already being worked out is tried and tested. And if there is a problem, you don't have to sweat it out yourself and go on to Mr. Google to work out what it is you've gone wrong. You just send an instant message to somebody at the podcast host company and they'll sort it out for you or tell you where you are going wrong. So we're not talking about much money for these podcasts, maybe a maximum of 10 pounds and dollars kind of equivalent really. And you know, it's really not a massive investment to be doing this. And a lot of the podcast hosts will have these deals whereby if you sign up for a year, you get a certain amount of discount off them as well. Certainly there are others that are giving discounts for people that are setting up Flash Briefings because it's a new thing. And these podcast host wants to get in there and they want people to be uploading this daily content using their platform. So you know, it is worth looking about at the different pockets. Cos hosts that are available. I Know podcast is agonise over who to go with because there seemed to be so many of them online. But you know, it is kind of as simple as kind of picking one of them. And what you're essentially doing is uploading your audio files to that podcast host and that they're then giving you basically a URL to an RSS feed. And that URL is just copied and pasted across into the Alexa dashboard. It says easy copy and paste, you point Amazon in the right direction of where you're uploading your files. It takes care of the rest, you schedule them to go out each day. And it basically pulls the latest file from that podcast host address each day. So it really does take the hard work and the legwork of getting your audio out there and onto the speaker. And as Peter says, while you could put it onto your own website that's also very memory heavy, something that might slow down your site which wouldn't help you in Google terms being searched for and all that stuff. Anything. So it really is worth just having a little look out there and seeing what the podcast hosts are offering, and, and signing up and getting going.

And we're going to be talking about how to choose the best podcast host a little bit later on this month. As Flash Briefing February continues because we're here to give you the skill set the mindset and the marketing, so you can build a better briefing. And amongst those features, if you're thinking to yourself, Well, I'd much I really would like the idea of all this content, being somewhere that I can kind of access it and so it is on my page. Yeah, what you can do is you can upload the content to your podcast hosts, and then have it all on a page there so you can have people pointed to hear all of your Flash Briefings going back the last week, month, year, whatever, all in one place. It's still available for you something else which is interesting, which is worth mentioning, just before we finish today. We've talked several times about a podcast host So just to say get we've said a couple of times over the last couple of three days, your Flash Briefing audio is essentially a short podcast, it's only up to 10 minutes. Sweet Spot, as Suze said a couple of days ago, is probably going to be what I would say, you know, 90 seconds, two minutes, three minutes, kind of absolute tops. And where else would you be hosting this than a podcast host? So there is no such thing as a kind of Flash Briefing host. They go by the generic name of a podcast host. So, you know, sometimes the terms Flash Briefing and podcast are a little bit interchangeable. A Flash Briefing can be a podcast, but a podcast can't be a Flash Briefing necessarily. Because if a podcast is more than 10 minutes, it just can't exist as a Flash Briefing in the Alexa platform. So hopefully you've kind of got your head around that. And tomorrow, we're going to be back with day for a Flash Briefing February and we're going to be talking a few tech tips for you. However, I would say and I'm sure Susie is going to back me up on this just before we go, you don't need to shell out a whole stack of cash is not too much money. We're talking about only a small amount of money, maybe 1015 quid or dollars or euro, a month for your podcast host. And, frankly, not too much more than that for a bit of kit that you're going to be using time and time again for the next few days, weeks, months and years, as your Flash Briefing becomes a success, but we'll talk about tech tomorrow. As Flash Briefing February continues. Until then, bye bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai