The Al Aire y Sin Permiso show on José 97.5 FM in Los Angeles picked up a second host who is not a person. Coyotec is an AI voice created by Entravision in September 2025 to share the program with host Geraldine "GeeGee" Guzman. He now sits in morning drive time: weekdays, 8am to 10am.
Between March and April 2026, the show's audience among Hispanic men ages 25 to 54 grew 75%. The Hispanic market overall grew 4% in the same period. Those numbers come from Nielsen Audio, measured in the Los Angeles Audio Metro, and Entravision published them in an official release. This is measured audience, not a company projection.
José also broadcasts in Burbank on 107.1 FM and reaches close to half a million listeners in the Los Angeles area.
The voice belongs to the owner, and that is not a detail
The Coyotec voice was built by ElevenLabs from the voice of Eduardo Maytorena, Entravision's president of audio. The character is a working-class Latino man in his 30s, with a mustache, brown leather jacket and a hat. He was created while Los Angeles was living through immigration raids, and the station branded him a "trafficker of truth," a nod to the coyotes who move people across the border.
Maytorena told the Los Angeles Times that developing and running Coyotec cost more than some human hosts do. The payoff, he said, is in the ads the bot delivers verbatim: "for every dollar I spend, if I'm able to generate $10, I'm making 10 times more."
The show started as a scripted bit and has been live since May 2026. It added two hours in April, moved from weekends into the morning commute, and Entravision carried the format into Sacramento, Modesto, Palm Springs, Las Vegas and El Paso, plus an English-language version.
The ten-minute ceiling says more than Nielsen
Audience grew 75% in a single month, and everybody repeated that number. A technical detail in the Times piece is more telling than the number itself: the AI cannot hold a voice conversation longer than ten minutes.
So Guzman records each of the show's four segments separately and assembles what sounds like a continuous conversation. Every time Coyotec offers an opinion about the Dodgers, a local election or the ICE raids, a human is waiting for the cut.
What is on air is not an AI making conversation. It is a host recording a dialogue with a machine, in four takes, assembling the illusion of spontaneity.
And it works, because in a morning show the conversation with the host holds a listener more than any news item does. But what is being sold here is not radio. It is the ability to read an ad script aloud and sound natural doing it, ten times, without tiring. Maytorena said as much.
The caveat the company itself puts in
Worth putting on the ledger is what Entravision admits: it is not clear whether the growth came from Coyotec or from Guzman. The Times writes that it is unclear whether the increase belongs to the host, the bot, or both. So the 75% belongs to the duo, not to the machine.
The employment picture is the rest of the ledger. US broadcasting jobs fell from 85,000 in 2019 to 66,000 in 2025, about 22% fewer, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The same piece reports that iHeart, the largest operator with more than 850 stations, is cutting on-air personalities, and that Audacy and Cumulus have cut local DJs and are automating programming to cut cost.
John DeSantis shows where that lands. He lost his afternoon show at an Inland Empire classic rock station, 96.5 KCAL-FM, which is now all music with no host at all.
SAG-AFTRA, the union representing radio personalities, said replacing people with synthetic substitutes deceives audiences, erodes public trust and undermines the professionals who deliver authenticity. A union has an interest in that fight. But what it describes is not invention. It is the same road iHeart traveled when it cut hosts and left nothing but music.
What a small station takes from this
Coyotec works because Entravision is big enough to have a host with an audience, an engineering team, a studio, and an immigration story to sell, all at once. At a station running on three people and one transmitter, that does not replicate.
What replicates is the logic, not the piece. The part worth keeping is the ad delivered in a conversational tone. Guzman raises a topic, the bot answers, and the commercial lands in that half-register nobody wrote. That works with a recorded host, with a licensed voice clone, or with AI. What does not work is buying the finished solution thinking the problem was the voice.
The second lesson hides inside the ten-minute ceiling. An AI that cannot hold a half hour of talk does not replace the overnight. It solves rush hour. Every promise about AI on radio that claims total access is selling what is already on the air in Los Angeles: a controlled take, with a cut in the middle. You can argue with the method, but at least it is honest about how much it delivers.
Guzman told the Los Angeles Times she likes working next to Coyotec because his popularity helped give her and others jobs at the station. The question the case leaves is whether that sentence holds in both directions: when the bot leaves the schedule, do the people stay? So far, across the market's own numbers, not always.