A Spanish-language station in Los Angeles, José 97.5 FM, now runs a weekday morning show with a human host and an AI co-host called Coyotec. In August 2026 the show was added to five more stations in California, Nevada and Texas. The thing to understand is why this AI host is getting noticed when the first ones, in 2023 and 2024, made little difference.
A clone fills a shift, a character holds a conversation
In Portland, the AI host was a copy of a real DJ's voice that read generated segments on air. Listeners got the same kind of show with a synthetic voice, so there was no reason for anyone to tune in for it.
Coyotec is a different product. Its makers gave it a personality with a history, and it takes positions: it has talked about immigration raids, racism and what to do if immigration agents knock on your door. Its human partner, Geraldine Guzman, found that it started out too poetic, so she had it practise pronunciation and phrasing with her parents until it sounded like the relatives she grew up with. A host that a person is shaping toward the way her own audience talks is a very different thing from a clone.
The human is the producer
The conversation sounds live, but the work behind it is editorial. The AI handles only about ten minutes of conversation at a time, so Guzman records the show in four segments and joins them. She also picks the news stories and topics she feeds it, and she stays in charge even on days Coyotec refuses an instruction. That is the real job description: she picks the subject, the AI supplies a second view, and she decides what airs.
This is also why the audience figures need care. Entravision's own numbers show the audience of Hispanic men aged 25 to 54 growing 75% in a month, against 4% for the whole market. But the show also moved from one hour on Saturdays to weekday mornings, taking the place of a syndicated program. Some of the growth is simply a better time slot. What the AI added is harder to measure than the company's numbers suggest, but it is clear what it replaced: a syndicated hour made somewhere else.
What this looks like outside radio
Picture the owner of a regional building-supplies firm who records a five-minute video each week for her contractors. Alone, she talks at the camera and it comes out flat. Suppose she gives an AI character the week's price changes and delivery delays and tells it to play a doubting site foreman. It asks the questions her customers ask, and she answers them. She spends less time writing a script because half of the script writes itself, perhaps an hour a week saved. She is also a better presenter, because she is answering instead of lecturing. The same pairing works for a school department's parent newsletter or a recruiter's weekly note to candidates.
Where it stops
Coyotec exists partly because the station's managers were afraid of what a human host might say about immigration raids, and an AI avatar could say it without anyone's job or safety at risk. That is real, but the station still answers for every word, because a person chose to build the character and put it on air. A company that lets an AI voice say what its staff cannot has not removed the risk; it has moved it to the company.
The jobs question is open too. A radio contractor who made station jingles and promos believes her work was replaced by AI tools, and the company says it has let nobody go because of AI. Whichever is right, the pattern in this story is that the generic piece, the syndicated hour or the prerecorded station ID, is what AI replaces first. The piece with a person's judgment behind it gets promoted. For most jobs, the safer position is to be the person who steers the AI, as Guzman does.