A 40-page report, a textbook chapter, a research paper, your own notes from a course — most of it never gets read a second time, let alone listened to on a commute. Turning that document into a podcast episode means someone can actually absorb it while doing something else entirely. The hard part has always been the manual work in between: outlining, scripting, deciding who says what, recording, editing. Podcast Creator Studio does that whole middle step automatically, starting from the file itself.
Upload the document as a source
On the Sources tab of any podcast, add your PDF (or DOCX, or plain notes) as an upload. It gets parsed and indexed alongside any web pages or RSS feeds you've added — all of it becomes searchable source material for the episode, not just a one-time summary pass.
The script is grounded in what's actually in the document
When the episode generates, the writing step retrieves the relevant passages from your PDF and builds the script around them — the same retrieval-grounding pipeline used for web and RSS sources. That matters for two reasons:
- Specificity. Hosts reference the actual arguments, numbers, and examples in your document instead of a generic gloss of the topic.
- Fact-checking. Every claim in the script is checked against the source material; anything unsupported gets flagged and rewritten rather than shipped as-is.
Pick your hosts and format
Choose one host or several, assign each a voice, expertise, and personality, and pick a format — a two-person conversational breakdown, a solo narrated explainer, a debate between two takes on the same material. The same source document works for any of them.
Generate, review, publish
Generation produces the script, synthesizes audio in your chosen voices, and (if you enable it) lays down background music with ducking around dialogue. The finished episode can be scheduled to regenerate on a cadence, or run once as a standalone. Either way it comes back to you as a finished MP3 plus an RSS feed listeners can subscribe to.
What this is good for
- Turning a long report or whitepaper into something a team can listen to instead of read
- Study material — a textbook chapter as a discussion between two hosts, for review on the go
- Internal documentation or meeting notes, briefed out as an audio recap
- Books or long-form PDFs you own the rights to, read into an ongoing personal podcast
You can start with the studio's built-in AI at no cost, or bring your own API key (OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Gemini, Perplexity, Mistral for writing; ElevenLabs for voices) and pay each provider directly with no markup. Everything — your documents, your keys, your finished audio — stays on infrastructure you control.