If you said “podbot” or “chatcast,” very funny. But I’m being serious here.

While riding on BART this morning, listening to the latest episode of the Reveal, I heard this mashup in action.

Reveal is the podcast from the Center for Investigative Reporting. Alex Leston usually hosts the show but Anna Sale—host of WNYC’s Death, Sex + Money podcast—took over hosting duties for this episode. The focus was on the immigration crackdown in the U.S., but that’s incidental to technique Sale employed that made me sit up and pay attention. At the beginning of the show, she announced that listeners would be able to text messages in order to get more information on topics raised during the episode. To test it, she invited listeners to send a message to the specified number, in response to which they would get Sale’s photo.

During the episode, the episode focused on one mother and son in a detention center; she invited listeners to text a keyword in order to see video of the center. Another part of the show referenced a report; listeners could text REPORT in order to see the actual document being discussed.

I have been podcasting for nearly 13 years. My first post alerting communicators to the coming of chatbots goes back to April 2016. Yet I never considered marrying the two.

It’s genius.

Podcasting, after all, is primarily an audio format. Podcast listening is a passive, lean-back experience. Adding a chatbot makes it engaging. Sale announced each texting opportunity at exactly the right point of the podcast, repeating the number to which listeners would send the text. Recognizing the keyword, the bot would return the relevant visual asset in near real time. What’s more, it’s easy to pause a podcast in order to spend a little time with the visual. Incorporating a chatbot makes podcast listening a lean-forward experience for those who want to take advantage of it. Those who don’t can still lean back and skip the texting.

The kind of bot Sale used in the Reveal episode is neither expensive nor complicated. There’s no Artificial Intelligence, no branching, no need to respond to multiple inquiries. Just send the right keyword and the bot sends back the right content. You could learn to code a bot like this in 10 minutes.

The only improvement I would make is including the number for texting (as well as the each of the keywords for retrieving the various visuals). Alternatively, you publish all of those visuals as part of the show notes. (In fact, if your show notes includes visuals, adding the chatbot for listeners who never visit the website would give those visuals greater reach.)

I will have to start expanding my thinking about which technologies can play nice with other technologies.