That was my first thought when I learned about Nomono's portable recording setup last year. Since then, the price has dropped slightly to $2,490. But my main concern remains: Who needs this thing when you can get a small audio recorder and lavalier mics for far less? Nomono's kit includes four wireless lav mics, as well as a space recorder for room tone and spatial data, all of which charge in a portable carrying case. Your recordings are automatically uploaded to Nomono's cloud service, where you can optimize their audio quality (and eventually edit them in your browser).

Roughly speaking, about 22,000 new podcasts are launched in a month. There are close to 2.5 million (more than 71 million episodes) in the Apple Podcasts directory right now, according to Podcast Industry Insights. And those are just the ones we know about. They're going direct to their listeners, selling premium content and having big success," says Andy Taylor, formerly of BBC Radio and founder of Cardiff-based R&D consultancy Bwlb. And that's to say nothing of the growing volume of podcast-like content, whether created by brands for promotion or event producers that want, for example, to make talks available on-demand. Every piece of content needs to be produced and distributed, whether by audio professionals or folks learning the craft. Therefore, the more they can automate large swaths of production, the more they can focus on the content. "The different places audio is being published have just exploded," explains Jonathan Wyner chief engineer at M Works Mastering and a professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston. "With all those contexts, there is a real motivation and imperative for creators to be more versatile." Not to mention, more productive and efficient. Artificial intelligence (AI) -- software that can automate tasks previously done by humans -- holds the key to handling the tsunami of podcast content. Not only can AI speed up production, it can make podcasts sound better and set the stage for the audio experiences of tomorrow. "AI basically helps take care of repetitive tasks to quicken the workflow of the podcaster," explains Manos Chourdakis, research engineer at Nomono, which develops AI-based podcasting tools. "For example, with AI, you don't have to listen to a whole podcast to find where someone said something wrong, then replace or remove it.