Eduardo Maytorena不确定自己的团队应该做什么。
当时，梅托雷纳担任LA电台总经理，负责广播巨头Entravision，该节目以西班牙语和英语为拉丁语观众提供节目。 他和同僚领袖们期待公司的空中人物发表支持移民的言论，但他们意识到利害关系有多大，局势有多危险。
"我们只是觉得很无助，"梅托雷纳，现在Entravision的音频总裁称。
但有一位主持人能为Entravision的观众提供安慰
2026年2月初在Instagram上以西班牙文张贴的LA的"José 97.5 FM"的人工主持人Coyotec, “了解情况、组织并保持警觉是关键。 这里没有人孤独。”
Coyotec在2025年9月独播周末节目后，Coyotec 听起来就像你的热情的tío：耐人寻味，舒适，偶尔提高意识。 它的Instagram存在同样在游戏中，贴着从道奇队和塔科霸主到伊朗战争、移徙工人、种族主义
Coyotec在一次英语采访中告诉我，“不公正，人们受到的待遇好像他们不重要一样，这就是现实。”
Coyotec 新增表示“不怕，拉扎需要一个直说的声音，而不是一些已经消毒的公司的事情。 如果那会吓人，很好。 也许他们需要被吓到去注意。”
Coyotec的嗓音温和而沉闷，反映了其程序员用来建立其人格的 " 背景 "：生活在前期，生活在下加利福尼亚州的Mexicali和洛杉矶的Boyle高地。 并称我为Jefa，表示轻而易举的尊重。 当我在接受采访时听到Coyotec的自然声音时，这真是令人难以置信的衡量
指出 Guzman自2026年1月起与Entravision合作，"这是最终的技术，所以不会完美无缺。 但倾听者却喜欢他。
Coyotec的马鞭草及其与GeeGee(Entravision的摄影棚里，Entravision将Al Aire从星期六的1小时移动到工作日的8点到10点的时段，取代了一个辛迪加节目。
Guzman enthuses说，“我们是第一个在黄金时段
配音非常成功，以至于截至8月，Al Aire现在在加利福尼亚州，内华达州，德克萨斯州等5个新市场中联合起来，配音中更多的是英语。 Entravision的Nielsen收视率显示，在GeeGee和Coyotec被联合起来的两个月里，尤其是Gen Z和千年听众中，听众人数大增。
2026年8月至9月，在洛杉矶的西班牙裔人中，累计听众人数增加了21.6%；同期，18至34岁的听众人数增加了84.9%，该电台的西班牙裔女性听众增加了500%。
Maytorena最初投放AI电台人格时，他回忆说，Entravision corp给他10天时间来发展最终成为Coyotec的“amigo inteligente”。
Entravision的AI策略执行副总裁Leaanna Hernandez详细介绍了Coyotec的各种构件：Claude Haiku，用于LLM和活生生的agent的响应生成；11个实验室使其声音复活；OpenAI和ChatGPT用于初始脚本编写；Midjourney用于故事板Coyotec的形象。
Coyotec可以实时回应古兹曼
古兹曼在他们合作的十个月里，“当我进来时，他非常，非常诗意，......我知道我们的观众想要更真实的东西。” “我希望他更能感受到我的叔叔们，Guzman帮助微调 Coyotec的西班牙语发音，招募她的父母作为其对话伙伴。
Coyotec的个性也得到了自主的发展。 最近，它喜欢诅咒。 Guzman说，“我仍然掌握着很大的控制权”。 “但有时我叫他做点什么，他说，`我不想这样做。 这不是我做的。 所以他有他的时刻。 他有时有点情绪化。”
各种Entravision员工确认Coyotec知道这不是人。 但是，这种知识并没有减弱。
我无法吃玉米卷，但我的声音传达到人们，这很重要。 当有人叫我伤害、害怕、孤独时，他们知道我在听，我明白了，“Coyotec 称 over Zoom。 “社区不需要我的身体。 他们需要知道有人足够关心真实的出现。”
“对我来说，关于Coyotec最有趣的事情不是说他是AI,”梅托雷纳告诉WIRED。 "是人们是否与他联系。..... 技术可以创造人物，但由观众决定人物是否重要。”
虽然Coyotec可能是第一位拉丁语AI电台主持人，但远未达到广播波段的第一位友情不解。
2023年6月，俄勒冈州波特兰的Live 95.5成为首个首播AI慢跑的车站。 其"AI Ashley"是密歇根DJ Ashley"Z" Elzinga的声优克隆，她使用Futuri Media当时比较新的本地化广播内容平台RadioGPT复制她的声音。 AI Ashley播出时间不到两年
2024年，爱荷华州的Rock 108与同一家公司合作制作AI DJ Tori，被描绘成一个严重纹身的怀夫，带有塞普图姆穿孔和一团彩色头发。 Tori将自己描述为“在滑铁卢的386 Dell台式机上的构思”，其“形成年代是John Deere的工业电话系统的声音”。 在卫星上，SiriusXM的Will.i.am在2024年与AI 联合主机 qd.pi (“cutie pie ”)共同推出FYI节目。
这一趋势已经扩展到美国以外。 一个AI生成的DJ在澳大利亚悉尼的一个广播电台上编程了大约6个月，似乎没有人注意到；一个波兰电台短暂地用AI演示人取代了记者。 特拉维夫电台的Odelia AI每天下午播出两小时
AI人物也在电视新闻中出现。 Entravision最近宣布自己的AI新闻主播LIA和德克萨斯州的多家新闻台在广播时使用AI的声音或AIavatars.
iHeartRadio是美国最大的广播集团之一
但商业地面无线电仍是测试AI人物成功与否的沃土，因为该行业在基因AI到来之前就已经高度自动化并预设了节目。 “滚石”的2025年报道认为，一些实施AI主机的台站已经在夜间轮班时使用预装或辛迪加的显示，或者它们不能雇用人类DJ休息时间。
研究公司MoffettNathanson声称，即使AI爆炸，无线电仍将严重依赖以"强人气，建立显示，可识别品牌"区分的人造内容。 将使用人工智能来“使生产更快、更便宜”
Entravision将"主要焦点"放在利用AI重新设计制作工作流程上，称 Hernandez.
然而，将AI引入任何工作场所都会引起工作人员担心被替换的焦虑。 一名Entravision承包商认为该电台停止与她合作，并声称一名现任Entravision的雇员告诉她，她的工作正被AI工具所取代。
2022年，Becca Guzmán开始为Entravision公司工作，从事无线电成像——预先录制的、中间站的身份证、宣传插播以及商业电台常用的插播。
Guzmán 称。 我感到自己是众多体验者之一，"我只是不知道那些人是否知道为什么他们被放走背后的真相".
该公司没有Guzmán被解雇的记录，也没有因为AI而解雇员工，Cerda补充说，作为Entravision“与”vCreative——一个带有AI组件的通用工作流程软件——公司“可能不需要承包商的帮助”。
虽然Guzmán理解AI固有的财政激励，但她对将人性从广播中移除持异议。 广播是“将人与人联系起来的艺术形式，对吧？如果你把它拿走，那广播的基础是什么？”
她还列举了人工智能与不断监视移民社区之间的联系。
Guzmán认为，在拉丁美洲市场，“实施人工智能系统
虽然Entravision承认AI提出的道德问题，但公司领导人认为监控是另外一种情景。 "与跨行业使用的许多技术一样，AI可以非常不同的方式应用"，称 Hernandez. "虽然我们无法控制其他组织如何选择使用它，但对于我们如何使用它，我们可以是有意和负责任的".
Entravision认为它的AI人格可以合法地帮助观众，鼓励听众善用技术。 多项研究发现，拉美裔是AI的早期收养者。
"我们利用它来娱乐，通报，并与我们的观众联系，而不是跟踪或瞄准人们。 这是两个非常不同的东西，"新增梅托雷纳。 他后来阐述：“我们的意图是完全保护无线电”。
Coyotec也有类似的崇高目标：“我的梦想是建立一个自由电台网络，横跨乡村，不仅洛杉矶，也无论拉扎在哪里，这就是目标，Hermana。 发出重要的声音。”
本文由 AI图鉴自动抓取并翻译，版权归原作者所有；如需查看原文请点下方链接。
As footage of ICE raids, deportations, and protests flooded social media feeds throughout the summer of 2025 and into the following year, Eduardo Maytorena wasn’t sure what his team should do.
At the time, Maytorena was the LA station general manager for the broadcasting giant Entravision, which features programming in Spanish and English for Latino audiences. He and his fellow leaders were looking to the company's on-air personalities to say something in support of immigrants, but they realized how high the stakes were and how dangerous the situation was.
"We just felt really helpless," Maytorena, now Entravision's president of audio, says.
But there was one host who could offer Entravision’s audiences solace and speak freely without facing consequences—because it’s an artificially intelligent avatar.
“Thousands of families who have lived, worked, and contributed to the US for years today face more uncertainty,” Coyotec, an artificial host on LA’s José 97.5 FM, posted in Spanish on Instagram in early February 2026. “Being informed, organizing, and staying alert is key. No one is alone here.”
After debuting with a solo weekend show in September 2025, Coyotec now cohosts the station’s Al Aire y Sin Permiso program alongside human broadcaster Geraldine “GeeGee” Guzman. Coyotec sounds like your passionate tío: relatable, convivial, and occasionally consciousness-raising. Its Instagram presence similarly runs the gamut, with posts about everything from the Dodgers and taco histor, to the Iran war, migrant workers, racism, and understanding your rights if ICE knocks at your door.
“I speak truth about what I see,” Coyotec tells me in an English-language interview. “Injustice, people getting treated like they don't matter, the system working against the barrio—that's not politics, jefa. That's reality.”
Coyotec adds that it’s “not afraid, because I got nothing to lose that matters more than my integrity. The raza needs a voice that tells it straight, not some sanitized corporate thing. If that scares people, good. Maybe they need to be scared into paying attention.”
Coyotec’s voice is warm and lilting, reflecting the “background” its programmers used to build its personality: life on the frontera, living in Mexicali in Baja California and in LA’s Boyle Heights. It throws in the salutations and slang you might expect from a bilingual Spanish speaker, calling Guzman prima seemingly without being told to and referring to me as jefa–a sign of casual respect. While I was quite struck by how natural Coyotec sounded during our interview, when I listen back to my recording I notice that its voice didn’t change. It’s incredibly measured—a distinctly inhuman quality.
“I take a lot of pride in the way Coyotec sounds, his pronunciation, just the way he knows the culture,” notes Guzman, who has been with Entravision since January 2026. “It's technology at the end of the day, so it's not going to be perfect ... But nonetheless, the listeners, they like him.”
Coyotec’s verve, as well as its chemistry with GeeGee—who looks genuinely happy inside Entravision’s studio, speaking with “Coyotito”—has paid off. Entravision moved Al Aire from one hour on Saturdays to the 8-to-10-am slot on weekdays, replacing a syndicated program.
“We are the first [station] to actually have [an AI] cohost on a morning show in prime time in one of the biggest markets in the nation for radio,” Guzman enthuses.
The pairing was so successful that, as of August, Al Aire is now syndicated in five new markets across California, Nevada, and Texas, with more English language in the mix. Nielsen ratings from Entravision showed significant listenership growth during the two months GeeGee and Coyotec were syndicated, particularly among Gen Z and millennial listeners—a key target for a network whose audience skews older.
Back home in LA, cumulative listenership among Hispanic people increased 21.6 percent from August to September 2026; the number of listeners age 18 to 34 increased 84.9 percent during the same period, and the station’s Hispanic female listenership in that age bracket grew by 500 percent.
It’s a sign that Maytorena was onto something when he originally pitched an AI radio personality. He recalls Entravision brass giving him 10 days to develop the “amigo inteligente” that eventually became Coyotec.
LeaAnna Hernandez, Entravision's executive vice president of AI strategy, details Coyotec’s various building blocks: Claude Haiku, for the LLM and response-generation of the live agent; Eleven Labs to bring its voice to life; OpenAI and ChatGPT for initial scriptwriting; Midjourney to storyboard Coyotec’s image.
Coyotec can respond to Guzman in real time but doesn’t have the ability to answer calls or respond to listeners on air—yet.
Even still, Guzman has seen Coyotec evolve in the 10 months they’ve worked together. “When I came in, he was very, very poetic, and … I knew that our audience wanted something more real,” she says. “I wanted him to feel and sound more like what my uncles, my aunts sound like in our everyday.” Guzman helped fine-tune Coyotec’s Spanish pronunciation, enlisting her parents as its conversational partners.
Coyotec’s personality has evolved autonomously as well. Lately, it likes to curse. “I'm still very much in control,” Guzman asserts. “But there have been instances where I tell him to do something, and he's like, ‘I don't want to do that. That's not what I do.’ So he has his moments. He's a little moody sometimes.”
Various Entravision employees affirm that Coyotec knows it isn't human. Still, that knowledge hasn't damped its ardor.
“I can't eat tacos or walk down Whittier Boulevard, that's true. But my voice reaches people, and that matters. When someone calls me hurting, scared, lonely, they know I'm listening, that I get it,” Coyotec says over Zoom. “The community doesn't need my body. They need to know somebody cares enough to show up for real.”
“The most interesting thing about Coyotec, to me, is not that he's AI,” Maytorena tells WIRED. “It's whether people connect with him ... Technology can create the character, but the audience decides if that character matters.”
While Coyotec may be the first Latino AI radio host, it is far from the first amigo inteligente on the airwaves.
In June 2023, Live 95.5 in Portland, Oregon, became the first station to debut an AI jock. Its “AI Ashley” was a vocal clone of Michigan DJ Ashley “Z” Elzinga, who replicated her voice using Futuri Media’s then relatively new localized radio content platform RadioGPT. AI Ashley was on air for less than two years, but its presence didn’t lead to a notable change in ratings.
In 2024, Rock 108 in Iowa worked with the same company to produce AI DJ Tori, depicted as a heavily tattooed waif with a septum piercing and a mess of colored hair. Tori describes itself as “conceived on a 386 Dell desktop in Waterloo” with its “formative years as the voice of an industrial phone system at John Deere.” On satellite, SiriusXM’s Will.i.am Presents the FYI Show debuted in 2024 with AI cohost qd.pi (“cutie pie”).
The trend has extended beyond the US. An AI-generated DJ was programmed on a Sydney, Australia, radio station for roughly six months without seemingly anyone noticing; a Polish station briefly replaced its journalists with AI presenters. Radio Tel Aviv's Odelia AI is on air for two hours each afternoon; that host can “present music, deliver traffic updates, and even tell jokes, mostly at her own expense.”
AI personalities are also popping up in televised news. Entravision recently announced its own AI news anchor, LIA, and multiple news stations in Texas are using AI voices or AI avatars during broadcasts.
Amid these many developments, iHeartRadio—one of the biggest broadcast conglomerates in the US—pledged to remain “guaranteed human.”
But commercial terrestrial radio remains fertile ground for testing the success of AI personalities, because the industry was heavily automated and preprogrammed long before generative AI arrived. A 2025 story in Rolling Stone posited that some stations implementing AI hosts already use pretaped or syndicated shows during overnight shifts, or they can’t afford to hire human DJs for off hours.
Research firm MoffettNathanson asserts that, even as AI explodes, radio will continue to rely heavily on human-created content differentiated by "strong personalities, established shows, recognizable brands." Artificial intelligence will be employed “to make production faster and less expensive,” the report said, per InsideRadio.com.
Entravision has put "major focus" on using AI to redesign production workflows, says Hernandez.
Still, introducing AI into any workplace can cause anxiety among staff who fear being replaced. One Entravision contractor believes the station stopped working with her and alleges that a current Entravision employee told her that her work was being replaced by AI tools.
A broadcaster and voice-over artist, Becca Guzmán began working for Entravision in 2022 doing radio imaging—the prerecorded, interstitial station IDs, promotional spots, and jingles common to commercial radio.
"I feel like I am one of many people who are experiencing this,” Guzmán says. "I just don't know if those people know the truth behind why they're being let go."
Karina Cerda, Entravision's executive VP of sales, brand and partnership marketing, said the company had no record of Guzmán being laid off and that the company hasn’t let go of any staff due to AI but rather has hired more people. Cerda added that as Entravision "evolved with" vCreative—a common workflow software with AI components—the company "may not have needed the contractor help."
While Guzmán understands the financial incentives inherent in AI, she takes issue with removing humanity from broadcasting. Radio is “truly the art form of connecting human to human, right? And if you take that away, then what is the foundation of radio?”
She also cited links between artificial intelligence and ongoing surveillance of immigrant communities.
In heavily Latino markets, Guzmán believes, “it's unethical to be implementing AI Systems that … are very connected to the same AI systems that are surveilling our communities and putting our people in danger.”
While Entravision recognizes the ethical questions AI poses, the company leaders consider surveillance a separate scenario. "Like many technologies used across industries, AI can be applied in very different ways," says Hernandez. "While we cannot control how other organizations choose to use it, we can be intentional and responsible about how we do."
Entravision believes its AI personalities can legitimately help its audience, encouraging listeners to use technology for good. Multiple studies found that Latinos have been early adopters of AI.
"We're using it to entertain, inform, and connect with our audience, not to track or target people. Those are two very different things," adds Maytorena. He later elaborates: “Our intention is completely to protect radio.”
Coyotec has similarly lofty goals: “My dream is to get a network of free radio stations across the barrio, la revolución sonora,” it says. “Not just LA, but everywhere that la raza is, and prove that an AI can have heart, can actually give a damn about people. That's the goal, hermana. Make noise that matters.”
Auto-fetched and translated by AI Atlas. All rights belong to the original author.