Artificial intelligence, podcasting and Madison come together Saturday at the Black Business Hub.
On Feb. 24, SPEAK.Studio, a technology company that provides end-to-end services for podcasting, officially celebrated its opening in Madison with its “hello world” launch party. The company, which will be based at the Urban League’s Black Business Hub, 2352 S. Park St., has been quietly working to tweak final parts of its platform before officially letting Madison know it’s here and ready to offer its services to streamline podcast production.
“Our thoughts and our feelings, my belief is that tonight, everything changes. What I mean by that is, with speed,” said Matt Boatright-Simon, founder of SPEAK.Studio.
Boatright-Simon envisioned the idea for SPEAK decades ago growing up in greater Madison — now technology finally caught up to his idea. SPEAK uses artificial intelligence technology to help people streamline their ideas with an all-in-one service to produce podcasts and “get ideas out there,” Boatright-Simon said. It aims to reduce friction between having ideas and producing them into a tangible product.
“We take very complicated technology like AI, we take very complicated technology like blockchain and we make them easy. We take all of these things and put them together to make it easy so that podcasting and expressing your soul, your heart and your mind is easy,” Boatright-Simon said.
With a press of a button, the user of speak can go from recording to publishing ready. With that tech, SPEAK has produced multiple podcasts over the past couple years to get ready for its Madison debut.
SPEAK has steadily been producing content for about two years now, but revealed has bigger plans in the works. In its time tweaking the final aspects, SPEAK produced an award-winning podcast, “We Have Notes,” and others like “The Elite Podcast,” but it’s still ramping up.
The tech company plans on producing 10 original podcasts and says it has deals with over a 100 exclusive podcasts in the works.
But it also heralds the work of podcasters so far in Madison. SPEAK handed out an Innovator Award to Madison365’s Black Oxygen for continued work in “being able to interview anyone and everyone and get authentic, truthful, earnest stuff out,” Boatright-Simon said.
It’s not just content; SPEAK is also planning to launch an application next month. The tech company has more coming and will announce what it’s working on as it comes.
For now, SPEAK is centered on launching the app and finishing its office space at the Black Business Hub.
