Our developers spent the month of January focused on infrastructure and system upgrades, including a planned migration from LastPass to Google’s solution.
During this time, our product and go-to-market teams charted our course for the year and identified two key areas of focus for the first half of the year: content accessibility and integrations with your existing systems; and leveraging your text-based content for automatic audio file creation:
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AutoCast. This quarter, we will begin beta testing our text to audio solution we’re calling AutoCast. This allows you to create audio articles by submitting text to uStudio. We will automatically generate an audio episode and add it to your management console so that you can publish it to any show or simply grab an embed to give your audience an audio option for the written content you are already publishing to your Intranet or portals.
Please let us know if you’re interested in testing AutoCast by emailing product@ustudio.com.
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Easy embeds. We are enhancing our embed codes so that you can share smarter links to bring audiences into uStudio or allow them to play the content right where they are, in the systems your workforce uses daily.
Let us know whether you’d like to be part of our test team for Easy Embeds by emailing product@ustudio.com.
Coming soon
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Immersive color experience. Each show and episode will soon have a unique identity. The app will intelligently pick a theme color to use in the background that complements your artwork to create an immersive experience on the show and episode screens.
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Episode layout improvements. On both mobile and desktop experiences, audience members will be greeted with a fresh layout on the episode screen which highlights the most important actions, such as playing the episode, adding the episode to their playlist, and sharing the episode.
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Monthly webinars. We hope you’re enjoying our new webinars. Our plan is to continue to host them regularly to help you learn from your peers. Our last webinar featured Hormel Foodservice and how they have used podcasting for sales training, product knowledge education, and team onboarding. Here’s a link to a replay.
- API token rotation. As a part of security best practices, we are rotating API tokens. If your company uses APIs, you will receive a separate email with instructions on how to access the new tokens. We’ll work with you directly to ensure a smooth transition.
Recent UI Enhancements
Since our latest UI release, we have noticed a global increase in user activity. Over the coming weeks, you will continue to see incremental enhancements to the user experience in both the mobile and desktop applications. Don’t hesitate to let us know what you think!
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Better usability. Increased icon sizes, text size, and spacing makes actions like following a show and submitting feedback obvious to users and easier than ever.
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Better artwork. Larger artwork will make content screens more engaging while perusing Shows and Episodes.
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Hot search. When searching for an episode in the mobile app, search results will start appearing as you are typing. By seeing results in real time, users can find content quicker and refine search criteria on the fly to find exactly what they need.
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Artwork upload guidelines. In your admin console, we added recommended sizing for show and episode artwork to ensure the best display for end users.
