Listen and read at the same time

On the live page, a prompter shows the sentence that is on air. The word you hear is highlighted, so your eyes can follow your ears. On a phone, the words appear just above the player.

The presenters speak slowly and clearly, in American English. The sentences are short and the words are common. When a harder word is important for the story, the presenters explain it.

After its first broadcast, every programme goes to Listen again with a full transcript. Tap a sentence to hear it again.

What you can hear

• News bulletins, several times a day, with Maya and Alex: the main world news, explained simply.
• News flashes at most other hours: one or two stories in less than two minutes.
• Weather, sport, technology and AI: short updates when there is real news.
• Commentaries and interviews: our specialist columnists look closer at world politics, science and the environment, technology, health and the economy. Other programmes cover culture and the world.
• Stories: fiction in easy English, about everyday life.
• English guides: short, interactive lessons to listen and repeat useful English.
• Music between programmes.

New programmes join the station over time. On this website, times are shown in your own time zone. On air, the time is announced in UTC.

See today’s schedule →

Made with AI, and open about it

Slow English FM is produced by artificial intelligence. AI chooses the stories, writes the scripts, checks them and reads them with synthetic voices. No journalist writes or reads each bulletin. People designed the station: its rules, its sources and its checks. After that, the radio runs on its own, all day.

The facts do not come from the memory of the AI. They come from published news sources, and each programme cites them.

1. Collect. Every 30 minutes, the station reads the news feeds (RSS) of trusted publishers. It keeps the headline, a short summary and the link. It does not copy full articles.
2. Choose. An AI editor chooses stories by importance and consequences, not by country or by the number of articles. A story needs two independent publishers, or one official source.
3. Write. An AI writer turns the facts into short, clear sentences. Facts are attributed to their source. For the main stories, it reads the source pages for context, and it only uses pages it has opened.
4. Check. A separate AI checker compares the script with the sources. A story that the sources do not support is removed. If the bulletin cannot be validated, it is not broadcast.
5. Voice. Synthetic voices read the script at a calm pace, about 130 words per minute or slower.
6. Publish. After the first broadcast, the programme appears in Listen again, with its transcript and the links to its sources.

Our sources

On air, the presenters name the source of the facts, for example “BBC News reports…”. On this website, every programme lists its sources, story by story, with links, so you can check them.

The station follows more than 50 news feeds from over 20 publishers, chosen for their reliability and for different regions and topics:

• BBC News
• The Guardian
• NPR
• PBS News
• ABC News
• CBC News
• Fox News
• Al Jazeera
• France 24
• DW
• Le Monde
• Africanews
• CNA
• Sky News
• Ars Technica
• TechCrunch
• STAT
• ScienceDaily
• MedPage Today
• The BMJ
• NASA
• IARC (World Health Organization)
• CBS Sports
• Motorsport.com

Weather updates use forecast data from Open-Meteo.

Editorial standards

• Facts first, and every fact comes from a named source.
• No invented quotes, and no invented interviews with real people.
• Presenters and columnists have first names only: no titles, no invented jobs and no personal stories.
• No opinion presented as fact. A commentary is always introduced as a commentary.
• When sources disagree on something important, we say which source says what. We do not guess.
• Stories are chosen by importance. No region and no topic has a quota.
• Stories are fiction, and they are always presented as fiction.
• AI can make mistakes. Before you rely on a fact, open the linked sources.

Watch the radio on Twitch

Slow English FM is also live on Twitch, with pictures. You see the words on screen as they are spoken, a globe that shows where each story happens, and the weather for cities around the world.

Watch on Twitch ↗