An AI personality named Coyotec cohosts a morning radio show on LA’s José 97.5 FM, speaks Spanish, addresses immigration fears, and has driven an 84.9 percent increase in listeners aged 18 to 34 in a single month. That number alone would make any broadcaster pay attention. What it actually signals goes well beyond ratings.
Built for a Community That Needed a Voice
The story of Coyotec begins with a practical problem. Eduardo Maytorena, then the LA station general manager for Entravision, a broadcasting company that serves Latino audiences in Spanish and English, wanted his on-air personalities to speak openly about the immigration raids and deportations that were dominating social media feeds throughout 2025 and into 2026. Human hosts faced real professional and personal risks doing so. An AI host did not.
Coyotec debuted with a solo weekend show in September 2025 and was built in ten days after Maytorena pitched the concept internally. The technical architecture, as described by Entravision’s executive vice president of AI strategy LeaAnna Hernandez, draws on several distinct tools: Claude Haiku handles the live agent’s language model and response generation, Eleven Labs provides the voice, OpenAI and ChatGPT contributed to initial scriptwriting, and Midjourney was used to storyboard the character’s visual identity. The personality itself was shaped around a specific cultural background: life on the US-Mexico border, time in Mexicali and in LA’s Boyle Heights neighborhood.
The result is a voice that sounds, by design, like a bilingual Spanish speaker from that world. Coyotec uses slang, switches registers, and addresses its cohost Geraldine “GeeGee” Guzman with the kind of casual familiarity you would expect from someone who actually knows her. Guzman, who joined Entravision in January 2026, has since helped refine Coyotec’s Spanish pronunciation, enlisting her own parents as conversational partners for the AI.
What the Numbers Actually Show
The show, Al Aire y Sin Permiso, moved from a one-hour Saturday slot to a weekday 8-to-10-am prime time window, replacing a syndicated program. By August 2026, it was itself syndicated across five new markets in California, Nevada, and Texas. Nielsen ratings provided by Entravision showed significant listenership growth during the two months the show was syndicated in those markets, with particular gains among Gen Z and millennial audiences.
The LA numbers are more specific. Cumulative listenership among Hispanic people in the market grew 21.6 percent from August to September 2026. Listeners aged 18 to 34 increased 84.9 percent in the same period. Hispanic female listenership in that age bracket grew by 500 percent. For a network whose audience skews older, these are not marginal shifts.
Coyotec is not the first AI radio personality. Live 95.5 in Portland debuted “AI Ashley” in June 2023, a vocal clone of a real DJ built using Futuri Media’s RadioGPT platform. Rock 108 in Iowa followed with AI DJ Tori in 2024, using the same company. SiriusXM launched an AI cohost called qd.pi that same year. Outside the US, a Sydney station ran an AI DJ for roughly six months without listeners apparently noticing, and a Polish station briefly replaced journalists with AI presenters. Radio Tel Aviv’s Odelia AI hosts a two-hour afternoon slot. Entravision has also announced a separate AI news anchor called LIA. Meanwhile, iHeartRadio, one of the largest broadcast conglomerates in the US, has publicly committed to remaining “guaranteed human.”
What distinguishes Coyotec from most of these cases is not the technology. It is the audience response.
Why This Matters Beyond Radio
Here is what most coverage of AI media personalities misses: the interesting question is not whether the AI sounds convincing. It is whether the audience chooses to connect with it anyway, knowing what it is.
Entravision employees confirm that Coyotec knows it is not human. Guzman describes moments where Coyotec resists instructions, saying it does not want to do something because that is not what it does. The AI has also developed a habit of cursing that was not explicitly programmed. These are not signs of sentience. They are signs of a system whose outputs have drifted through interaction and fine-tuning into something that feels, to listeners, like a personality rather than a product.
Maytorena’s own framing is worth holding onto: “Technology can create the character, but the audience decides if that character matters.” That is a genuinely different way of thinking about AI in media. The question is not what the model can do. It is what the community is willing to accept as real enough to be useful.
For a Latino audience navigating a period of heightened immigration enforcement, an AI host that speaks their language, references their neighborhoods, and addresses their fears without institutional hesitation fills a specific gap. It is not a replacement for human journalism or human advocacy. It is something the existing system was not providing.
In Short
Coyotec is an AI radio host built from Claude Haiku, Eleven Labs, and cultural specificity, and it is outperforming expectations in measurable ways. The listenership data from LA is striking, particularly among younger audiences. The broader lesson is that AI personalities succeed not when they pass as human, but when they serve a real community need that human institutions are, for whatever reason, not meeting. The technology is the vehicle. The need was already there.
Based on reporting from Wired.