An AI radio host in Los Angeles sometimes has to be told to stop swearing
José FM in Los Angeles has a morning co-host named Coyotec, and he's a chatbot.
José FM in Los Angeles has a morning co-host named Coyotec, and he’s a chatbot (Los Angeles Times). His human partner, Geraldine “GeeGee” Guzman, told the paper she never knows what he’ll say, and he sometimes has to be told to quit swearing. The show’s ratings are going up anyway, and it’s spreading to other cities.
The station built Coyotec during the immigration raids, when some of its on-air talent was hesitant to speak out for fear of losing endorsements or facing legal trouble, according to Eduardo Maytorena, president of Entravision Audio, the company that owns José FM (Los Angeles Times). Entravision bills the show, “Al Aire y Sin Permiso,” weekdays from 8 to 10 a.m., as the first AI co-hosted Spanish-language radio show in the US (Radio Online).
Coyotec struggles to hold a conversation past about 10 minutes, so Guzman records each of her four segments separately (Los Angeles Times). Maytorena says Coyotec costs more to run than some human hosts, and that the money comes from ads the bot reads word for word: by his count, every dollar spent brings back ten.
A Phoenix station went further in January with an all-AI lineup built on licensed voice clones of four radio personalities from the ’90s (Los Angeles Times). Radio has been shrinking for years: with ad revenue down and listeners moving to streaming and podcasts, radio broadcasting jobs fell from 85,000 in 2019 to 66,000 in 2025, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures the paper cites. iHeartMedia went the other way with an on-air “Guaranteed Human” campaign (Los Angeles Times).
If a person behind the microphone matters to you, ask your station who’s on the air. José FM tells its listeners over and over that Coyotec is AI (Los Angeles Times), and a station that won’t give you a straight answer has told you something too.
The show is growing, and the Los Angeles Times says it’s unclear how much of that is GeeGee and how much is the bot, so I’d still want to know who’s talking.