Microsoft will soon take away your podcasts and offer no way to download them or export them. If you use the Copilot Podcasts feature, you have less than one month to listen to your created content.
Copilot Podcasts can create an audio podcast about a suggested topic. You can then listen to the created podcast within Copilot on the web or the Copilot apps for iOS or Android, at least until August 18, 2026. On that date Microsoft will retire the Copilot Podcasts feature and cut off all access to any podcasts created with the tool.
In a support document about the upcoming retirement, Microsoft specifies that all users who have podcasts in Copilot are affected and that none of the content will be accessible after the cutoff date.
Strangely, Microsoft will not provide a way to export podcasts or save them in any way; the content will simply disappear.
Losing access to digital content
This is the latest example of a tech giant taking away digital content and not providing recourse to consumers. Of course, Sony taking away movies and TV shows people paid for is worse than getting rid of AI-created podcasts, but there's a clear trend emerging. Tech giants are increasingly stripping away the ability for people to control content.
Microsoft never allowed you to download Copilot Podcasts, so it would have to create that feature just to offer it ahead of the tool's retirement. To share a created podcast, you have to share a link. But it's still strange to see podcasts disappear entirely.
I doubt Copilot Podcasts was a popular feature. Honestly, it's a bit strange. I asked it to create a podcast about American football in the UK and two imaginary people went back and forth about the history of the sport.
While podcasts can be valuable for the facts they include, personality is a major factor. Listening to the AI voices discuss American football feels like a couple bots reading a Wikipedia page.
In the episode about American football, the cadence is off and feels unnatural. No one interjects or accidentally talks over the other hosts. It's an entirely sanitized synthetic podcast.
There's also no way to confirm anything stated within created podcasts. That's fine for a humorous episode, but not if you use the feature to get context on a topic. As a small example, one of the digital hosts got the name of a football federation in Europe wrong.
All that being said, if Microsoft was confident in Copilot Podcasts to ship the feature, it should be confident enough to let people keep podcasts that were created.
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