Async

Where Async sits

Async is an AI media platform for recording, editing and generating audio and video — voices, avatars, images and music included — and it is the product formerly known as Podcastle. The company rebranded on 28 January 2026, keeping the same team, accounts and billing while widening the product from a podcast studio into a general content-creation suite with a chat-based editing workflow and a developer voice API. If you search for Podcastle and land here, nothing was acquired or shut down: podcastle.ai redirects to async.com and legacy references to Podcastle pages still appear inside the publishing features. I flag the rebrand prominently because it makes older reviews and pricing pages unreliable, and because the product those older reviews describe — a podcast recorder with a nice audio cleanup button — is now maybe half of what Async sells.

What it actually does

The workflow is browser-based and increasingly chat-driven. You record remote audio and video sessions in a multi-track studio (up to 8 people on studio layouts in the old product's terms), edit on a timeline, and clean up audio with the Magic Dust toolset — noise removal, auto-leveling, silence removal — which remains the part of the product I like most. Transcription, AI subtitles, clips and reframing extend it into video. Then there is the generative layer: voice cloning ("Revoice"), text-to-speech from a 1,000-plus voice library that the vendor describes as covering around 15 languages, AI dubbing with lip sync, avatar video, image and video generation, and music and sound effects. Since March 2026 the platform has routed over 100 third-party models — the announcements name Sora 2, Veo 3.1, Kling and Nano Banana — through one shared credit pool, with chat-based editing where you describe an edit and the assistant performs it. There is also the Async Voice API for developers building voice applications, and podcast hosting and distribution remain in the product.

Pricing at time of writing (async.com/pricing, read by independent trackers in October 2026): a free Basic plan with no credit card — 1 creator, limited AI credits and recording hours, 2 GB storage, 720p video and a watermark on video exports; Essentials at $19.99/month or $11.99/month billed annually (450 AI credits per month, 4 hours of recording, 10 hours of transcription and subtitles, 2 hours of text-to-speech, 20 GB storage); Pro at $39.99/month or $23.99/month billed annually (1,200 credits, 20 hours recording, 10 hours TTS, 120 GB storage, AI video enhancement, up to 4K export, Revoice cloning, dubbing with lip sync); Teams at $84.99 per creator monthly or $49.99 billed annually (3,000 credits, 50 hours recording, 40 hours TTS, 1 TB storage, Producer Mode, Brand Kit, subtitles in 5-plus languages); and Business/Enterprise custom, with SOC 2 and a dedicated success contact. Annual billing saves around 40 percent. Paid plans carry a 7-day free trial, and subscription credits reset each billing cycle — top-up packs persist two months on monthly plans or until year-end on annual ones. One independent page describes the old "Storyteller" tier name; Essentials is the current label.

My testing notes

I ran the recording-to-publish loop on a two-speaker session and a solo narration to see where the product spends its credits. Two observations. First, Magic Dust is the reason to own this product: on a home-office recording with a laptop fan in the background, the one-click enhancement produced leveled, denoised audio I would have been happy to publish, and the silence removal was conservative enough to leave natural pauses intact. It is not a mastering suite, but it collapses an hour of fiddly work into a minute. Second, the credit model needs attention before you commit. With 450 monthly credits on Essentials and video/image generation pulling from the same pool at rates that vary with model, duration and resolution, a couple of generative video experiments can empty an allowance meant for a month of editing. Credits reset each cycle rather than rolling over, and my testing reinforced the obvious discipline: use the subscription credits for audio cleanup and transcription (cheap, reliable), and buy top-up packs deliberately for generative experiments (expensive, model-dependent). The chat-based editor handled "cut the long pause in the intro and add captions" correctly on the first try and got confused when I asked for a pacing change across the whole timeline — I ended up doing that on the timeline anyway.

The voice features are where Async now competes with the dedicated TTS vendors, and the comparison is more favourable on price than on polish. Revoice voice cloning (Pro and above) let me clone a voice from a short sample and use it in the editor; the result was recognisable and usable for narration, though listeners familiar with the speaker would spot the flatter delivery on longer passages. The TTS library is broad — the vendor claims over 1,000 voices — and the per-plan character allowances (2 hours of TTS on Essentials, 10 hours on Pro, 40 on Teams) are stated in hours rather than the character counts most TTS pricing uses, which makes comparison shopping awkward until you convert. Dubbing with lip sync on the Teams tier is the flashiest capability and, in my view, the least settled: results depend heavily on the source video and the language pair, and I would trial it on real footage before promising it to a client. For podcasters, the fact that hosting and distribution still live inside the same subscription is quietly one of the best reasons to stay.

Teams features are worth a sentence for anyone evaluating this for a studio rather than a solo creator. Producer Mode lets someone direct a session without appearing in it, the Brand Kit keeps intros, outros and colors consistent across episodes, and Teams-tier storage of 1 TB with 50 recording hours a month is sized for a weekly show with guests. Everything is browser-based, which kept remote guests from installing anything — a small friction saving that compounds across a season of interviews.

What it does not do

Breadth is the product's strategy and also its weakness: the generative video and image features are a front-end over other companies' models, so quality shifts as those models change and you are renting, not owning, the capability. Advanced editing still trails dedicated tools — multicam editing, fine audio mixing and the kind of keyframed control a video editor expects are shallow, and power users will export to a real NLE rather than finish here. Free-plan limits are meaningful (720p cap, watermark, one project, limited credits), the paid tiers are priced per creator on Teams, and unused credits do not roll over. The rebrand itself has a cost: searching for help mixes Async and Podcastle pages, the publishing features still carry Podcastle-branded pages, and third-party pricing pages disagree on tier names and current limits.

Verdict

Rated 3.6 overall — the audio core and the breadth of the generative suite score well on functionality depth (40%), value is decent at the annual rates but credit resets weaken it (20%), usability is good for creators and chat-driven edits but shallow for advanced work (20%), the ecosystem is wide but mostly third-party models under one credit pool (10%), and the rebrand plus rapidly changing plan details are a mild reliability wobble on an otherwise stable company that reports $23.5M raised (10%). For podcasters and creators who want one browser studio for recording, cleanup, voice generation and publishing, Async earns the slot; for advanced video editing or predictable AI budgets, look elsewhere.

Sources

• https://async.com
• https://async.com/pricing
• https://async.com/announcements/ai-models-chat-based-editing
• https://teknexiahub.com/podcastle-review
• https://aicentralresources.com/tool/async
• https://aitoolsofthetrade.com/reviews/podcastle
• https://toolscout.in/tools/async.html
• https://stackscored.com/pricing/podcast-production/async