Audio newsletter: a real audio edition of a data newsletter

An audio newsletter made by API: four Our World in Data posts became one short two-host edition. Hear it, copy the request, see its cost and our check.

How this was made. Audio and video overviews, slide decks and infographics are made with Google's Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM), on accounts that AutoContent operates. AutoContent has no agreement with Google. Google can limit or stop this access at any time.

The audio edition4 min 23 s

AI-generated with AutoContent APIDownload MP3 Full transcript (TXT)

Format: Podcast
Job: Newsletters
Language: English
Length: 4 min 23 s
Credits used: 10 credits
Cost on the Starter plan: €0.29
Generation time: 5 min 44 s
Generated on: 2026-11-02

Make this with the API

This output used 10 credits, which is €0.29 on the Starter plan (€29 per month for 1,000 credits). Failed generations use none. Generation time runs from the request to the finished file; it depends on the sources, the options and the queue.

Source and license

Our World in Data: four Data Insights (renewables and nuclear power, plastic in the ocean, electric cars in Turkey, the Living Planet Index), Our World in Data. License: CC BY 4.0.

Derived from four Data Insights by Our World in Data (https://ourworldindata.org), licensed under CC BY 4.0. Changes: the four posts were turned into one AI-generated podcast episode.

What came out, and what we would change

We sent the four posts of one issue as four links and asked for a short, calm episode that covers them in order, each with its key number. The episode runs 4 min 23 s. It opens with "Welcome to the audio edition of our weekly data newsletter" and ends with a question for the listener.

The key numbers match the posts: about half of one percent of plastic waste reaches the ocean (1.7 of 350 million tonnes), a 73% average decline in studied wildlife populations since 1970, renewables at 34% and nuclear power at 9% of global electricity in 2025, and electric cars in Turkey going from 1 in 100 new cars in 2022 to more than 1 in 5 in 2025.

Three things differ from what we asked or from the posts. The episode does not keep the order we asked for: it starts with plastic and ends with Turkey. The hosts add a picture of a geometric mean, rhinos falling from 10,000 to 100, that is not in the post; its arithmetic is right. And they say Chinese imports arrived all at once in 2023, but the post only says that cheaper imports, including from China, made the market more competitive. The tone is also less calm than we asked ("wild", "skyrocketed", "perfect storm"), and the closing question credits "a single policy shift" for a rise that the hosts had just explained with three causes.

To fix the order, name the items in your text in the order you want; "in order" alone was not enough here. "Do not name the writers" worked: no writer is named. The edition took 5 min 44 s to generate and used 10 credits. For a weekly newsletter podcast, send one request per issue and add podcastId, so every edition lands in the same RSS feed.

Guide for this job: Convert a newsletter into an audio digest.

Transcript excerpt

Speech-to-text of the output, not edited and without speaker labels. It is part of the sample output.

you would probably say a third or maybe half. Almost nine in ten people assume it's this massive chunk. Yeah, but the actual key number there is just half of 1%. I mean, out of the 350 million tons of plastic waste produced globally each year, only about 1.7 million tons makes it to the ocean. Wow. So it's less like the whole waste system is completely broken and more like assuming you dropped half your dinner on the floor when you actually just dropped a few crumbs. That is a great way to put it.
Most plastic is already managed responsibly. The context here is that the real challenge is just handling the 25% that is currently mismanaged. So it is a highly solvable problem, not a lost cause. Right. We just need to patch the specific leaks. And, well, our intuition fails us in the exact same way when we look at wildlife data, doesn't it? Oh, absolutely. The big number going around recently is the Living Planet Index report, showing a 73% decline in studied wildlife populations since 1970. Yeah, and media outlets constantly misreport this as 73% of all animals just vanishing from the Earth.

The exact request

The body that was sent to POST /content/Create, unchanged, and the same request as curl.

request.json

{
  "resources": [
    {
      "type": "website",
      "content": "https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-world-is-getting-more-of-its-electricity-from-renewables-but-less-from-nuclear-power"
    },
    {
      "type": "website",
      "content": "https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/what-share-of-plastic-waste-ends-up-in-the-ocean"
    },
    {
      "type": "website",
      "content": "https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/electric-car-sales-are-growing-rapidly-in-turkey"
    },
    {
      "type": "website",
      "content": "https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-living-planet-index-reports-a-73-average-decline-in-studied-wildlife-populations"
    }
  ],
  "outputType": "audio",
  "text": "This is the audio edition of a weekly data newsletter. Cover the four items in order, give each one its key number and one sentence of context, and keep the tone calm and factual. Do not name the writers.",
  "duration": "short",
  "language": "English"
}

curl

curl -X POST "https://api.autocontentapi.com/content/Create" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AUTOCONTENT_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"resources":[{"type":"website","content":"https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-world-is-getting-more-of-its-electricity-from-renewables-but-less-from-nuclear-power"},{"type":"website","content":"https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/what-share-of-plastic-waste-ends-up-in-the-ocean"},{"type":"website","content":"https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/electric-car-sales-are-growing-rapidly-in-turkey"},{"type":"website","content":"https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-living-planet-index-reports-a-73-average-decline-in-studied-wildlife-populations"}],"outputType":"audio","text":"This is the audio edition of a weekly data newsletter. Cover the four items in order, give each one its key number and one sentence of context, and keep the tone calm and factual. Do not name the writers.","duration":"short","language":"English"}'
# then poll until "status" is 100:
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $AUTOCONTENT_API_KEY" "https://api.autocontentapi.com/content/Status/<request_id>"

How we checked it

Transcript: We transcribed the output with Whisper large-v3-turbo and compared the transcript with the source.
Language: Detected en, requested en.
Loudness: -25.2 LUFS integrated, true peak -6 dBTP.
Notes: All key numbers match the four posts. The order differs from the request; the rhino picture is the hosts' own; the timing of Chinese imports is not in the post.
Checked on: 2026-11-02. Failed generations are run again and never published.

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