Wedel Software disrupts audio advertising and broadcast radio with Azure AI

Wedel Software, also known as Wedelsoft, is a disruptor of audio advertising and broadcast radio for all the right reasons. Simply put, it doesn’t want listeners to hear an ad for baby diapers when you’re a grandparent or don’t have children. If you do need diapers, it wants you to get a promotion directing you to the nearest store or delivery service based on your location.  

The tech media company believes relevancy and personalization of ads, especially in audio experiences, always benefit the advertiser and end user. And, when the advertiser can create helpful ads at scale, without having to hire voice talent or record new content, the real magic happens. 

Why? Radio stations and publishers have traditionally struggled with matching the advertising solutions of search and social media companies. There, you can just type in your ad and integrate dynamic data feeds for weather and time, and then it goes to market. Broadcast radio features endless manual labor, especially with voice talent. Budget and time don’t usually allow for hyper-targeted content and integrating dynamic data doesn’t seem possible compared to text ads. End users are left with…more diaper ads.

AI for Voice Ads

To meet the demand of customers and improve end-user experiences, Wedelsoft built an AI audio advertising solution, Adthos Platform, which features over 40 AI voices and direct publishing capabilities. Wedelsoft has worked with over 1,000 radio stations to date and supports many other industries. 

Companies can adopt the pre-built voices or onboard their own voice talent to create a new AI voice and pay actors in perpetuity based on voice usage. Microsoft Azure’s Neural Speech to Text is featured in choices, and Wedelsoft uses Custom Neural Voice to add new talent to the list of AI voices. And they are now testing cross-lingual capabilities, translating voices into different languages and giving advertisers global reach.

Endless Use Cases with Custom Neural Voice

Currently, Wedelsoft is working across sectors to provide dynamic audio advertising experiences. Its CEO, Raoul Wedel, is inspired by the many uses of this technology, from restaurants to ride-share companies to radio DJ personalities. 

“We are working with a well-known fast-food chain in the Netherlands. We made 180 versions of an ad with local address and it's geotargeted,” said Wedel. “If a listener is listening to a stream or a podcast somewhere, they can get a targeted ad with the local promotion. It solves a big problem because currently, the corporate leadership gives a budget to their local franchisees to run advertising campaigns. This creates inconsistencies in the market that we can help solve. Also, if the publisher knows your first and last name, and your birthday, then we can serve an ad saying, 'Hey, it's your birthday, congratulations you're going to get a promotion.' This was impossible in the past without AI.”

A local ride-share company is using Adthos to deliver geotargeted ads alerting customers how many cars are available to call. A company that reviews homeowner property tax and home value works with homeowners to lower property taxes from the city. To reach more potential customers, they ran a geo-targeted campaign telling homeowners, ‘Property tax in your area is on average 17% too high’ and to ‘contact for immediate support’. “They doubled their leads from a regular text or display campaign by having a dynamic audio strategy.” A morning show DJ with KISS FM Boston and Los Angeles  trained his voice to create on-air promotions. “He said, ‘oh, this is the greatest thing ever’ after we trained his voice. Now he doesn’t have to record promotions again, as he can create files in our platform with text.”

More disruption ahead with AI

What’s next for Wedelsoft? Wedel and his team are inspired by making things simple. “We want to use AI to create a complete ad with script and music. If you're a plumber, you type in joesplumber.com and it will create an audio ad for you. On the other end of the spectrum, how can we work with big home repair stores with all sorts of technical products and unique pronunciations? That will be a bigger challenge to create custom data sets, but once that is done, we can do instant ads based on any of the information we have.”