Show notes are the task most podcasters do badly, because they are the task everyone does last. The recording was fun. The edit was work. The show notes get twelve minutes at 11pm before publishing, and they end up as three sentences and a link.
That is a real cost, because the episode page is where discovery happens. This guide covers generating descriptions, show notes, and chapter markers from a recording, and more importantly, what to do with the generated draft so it sounds like your show.
What You Can Generate
Open a session in Session Viewer and go to the Episode Assets tab. Four asset types are available:
- Episode description. The short paragraph that appears in podcast apps.
- Show notes. The longer bulleted breakdown of what the episode covers.
- Chapter markers. Timestamped sections for navigation.
- Best moments. AI-selected highlights with timestamps and quotes.
Each is generated from the session transcript, so they reflect what was actually said rather than what you planned to cover.
Do This First: Rename Speakers
Before generating anything, rename the speakers on the session.
Session Viewer lets you replace "Speaker 1" and "Speaker 2" with real names. It takes seconds, and everything downstream inherits it. Show notes that attribute a quote to a person are useful. Show notes that attribute it to Speaker 2 are a rewrite job.
This is the single most common reason generated assets come out needing heavy editing.
Generating the Assets
From the Episode Assets tab, generate each type. The transcript is the source, so a session with a clean transcript produces better assets than one where half the audio was crosstalk.
Everything generated is editable in place. You are getting a draft, not a finished artifact, and the draft is meant to be worked on. Edit and save directly in Session Viewer.
Custom Instructions: The Part That Makes It Sound Like You
This is where most of the quality comes from, and it is worth setting up once properly.
Session Viewer has a Custom instructions panel with three separate style guides:
- Episode description style
- Show notes style
- Chapter markers style
These are saved per account and applied every time you generate assets. Set them once and every future episode inherits them.
Write them specifically. Vague instructions produce generic output. Compare:
Weak: "Write good show notes."
Better: "Bulleted, 6 to 10 bullets. Each bullet is one specific claim or story from the episode, not a topic label. Lead with the guest's name on first mention. No adjectives in front of the guest's title. Never open with 'In this episode.' End with a line about where to find the guest."
The second one produces show notes you can publish with light editing. The first produces show notes you rewrite.
Do the same for descriptions and chapters:
Description: "Two sentences maximum. First sentence states the specific thing the listener will learn. Second sentence names the guest and their relevant credential. Under 400 characters. No questions as hooks."
Chapters: "Title case, under 40 characters each. Describe the actual content, not the format. 'Why the first product failed' not 'Discussion continues'. Aim for 6 to 12 chapters on a one-hour episode."
Filling Style Guides From Your Show
If you already have a back catalogue with a voice you like, there is a faster route than writing instructions from scratch.
The custom instructions panel includes Investigate channel from link. Paste a link to your show and Podmod researches the channel and drafts all three style guides at once, based on how your existing episodes are written.
This gives you a starting point that already resembles your show. Edit from there rather than starting blank. It is particularly useful for shows with an established format, where the goal is consistency with what already exists rather than a new voice.
Chapter Markers and Host Markers
If you recorded in Podmod Studio and dropped markers during the take, chapter generation reads them.
The marker hotkeys during a Studio recording are:
- M for a generic marker
- C for "clip this"
- X for "edit out"
A generic marker at a topic change is, in effect, you telling the chapter generator where a section boundary belongs. Press M when the conversation moves to a new subject and your generated chapters will follow the structure you heard in the room rather than one inferred afterward.
This is a small habit with a disproportionate payoff. It costs half a second during the recording and produces meaningfully better chapters.
Why Chapters and Show Notes Matter for Discovery
The episode page is doing more work than it used to.
Podcast discovery increasingly happens through search rather than browsing, and a page with a player and a two-line description is close to invisible to it. A page with a real summary, chapter timestamps, and a transcript turns a conversation into thousands of indexable words, where every question your guest answered becomes searchable text and every quotable line becomes something an AI-generated answer can lift and attribute back to your show.
Chapters do double duty. In podcast apps and on video platforms they improve usability directly, letting a listener jump to the part they came for. They also give search systems a structured outline of the episode's contents.
The audience is there to be reached. Edison Research puts monthly podcast consumption at an all-time high of 58% of Americans age 12 and older, with YouTube now the most-used podcast service among weekly consumers. On YouTube specifically, chapters and keyword-rich descriptions are not optional metadata. They are part of how the episode gets surfaced at all.
Editing the Draft: A Checklist
Generated assets are a first draft. Run this pass before publishing:
- Check every name and figure. Anything specific in the draft came from the transcript, and transcripts mishear proper nouns. This is the one non-negotiable check.
- Cut the first sentence. Opening sentences in generated drafts tend to be throat-clearing. The second sentence is usually the real start.
- Make one bullet specific. If the show notes are all topic labels, rewrite at least one into an actual claim from the episode. It changes how the whole list reads.
- Verify chapter timestamps against the audio at two or three points.
- Add what the transcript could not know. Links, guest handles, sponsor copy, references to previous episodes.
- Read the description aloud. It is the only asset that gets read in isolation, in an app, by someone deciding whether to press play.
Six steps, maybe five minutes. That is the difference between publishable and generic.
Why This Is Worth Systematizing
Production workload is the main reason shows stop. Forbes has covered why so many podcasts fail, and creator surveys point at the same thing: one study of full-time creators found 62% reporting severe burnout symptoms.
Show notes are a small task that recurs every single episode forever. Getting the recurring cost down from forty minutes to eight, without dropping quality, is the kind of change that determines whether episode fifty happens.
A Realistic Publishing Flow
- Finish recording. Save the session.
- Open Session Viewer. Rename speakers.
- Generate description, show notes, chapters, and best moments.
- Run the six-step editing pass.
- Save the edited versions in Session Viewer.
- Pull the transcript and audio from the Downloads tab.
- Publish, using best moments as your clip list.
The assets exist before you have finished the audio edit, which means the episode page can be built in parallel rather than as a final blocking step at 11pm.
Writing Chapters People Actually Use
Chapters are the asset most often generated and least often edited, which is a shame, because they are also the one listeners interact with directly.
A few rules that make them better:
Describe content, not structure. "Why the first product failed" is a chapter. "Part two" is not. Nobody has ever clicked "Discussion continues."
Front-load the distinctive word. Chapter lists are scanned, not read. The interesting noun should be early enough to survive truncation in a podcast app or on a video platform.
Keep the first chapter short. The intro is the section people skip. Making it its own brief chapter is a courtesy, and it stops the substance of the episode being buried inside a chapter called "Introduction."
Six to twelve for an hour. Fewer than six and they are not useful for navigation. More than twelve and the list becomes something to scroll rather than scan.
Do not chapter the ad break. Listeners can find it themselves.
These belong in your chapter style guide rather than being applied by hand each time. Written once, they apply to everything you generate afterward.
Set Your Style Guides Once
The generation is quick. The custom instructions are what make it useful, and they are a one-time setup that every future episode benefits from.
Write your three style guides, or paste your show link and edit what comes back, at app.podmod.ai.