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Oct 26, 2026 5:00 AM
Coyotec is bilingual, swears, and tells listeners how to defend themselves against ICE. Its popularity comes as more broadcasters are experimenting with artificial personalities.
Coyotec, an artificial intelligence radio cohost.Courtesy of Entravision
As footage of ICE raids, deportations, and protests flooded social media feeds throughout the summer of 2025 and into the following year, Eduardo Maytorena wasn’t sure what his team should do.
At the time, Maytorena was the LA station general manager for the broadcasting giant Entravision, which features programming in Spanish and English for Latino audiences. He and his fellow leaders were looking to the company's on-air personalities to say something in support of immigrants, but they realized how high the stakes were and how dangerous the situation was.
"We just felt really helpless," Maytorena, now Entravision's president of audio, says.
But there was one host who could offer Entravision’s audiences solace and speak freely without facing consequences—because it’s an artificially intelligent avatar.
“Thousands of families who have lived, worked, and contributed to the US for years today face more uncertainty,” Coyotec, an artificial host on LA’s José 97.5 FM, posted in Spanish on Instagram in early February 2026. “Being informed, organizing, and staying alert is key. No one is alone here.”
After debuting with a solo weekend show in September 2025, Coyotec now cohosts the station’s Al Aire y Sin Permiso program alongside human broadcaster Geraldine “GeeGee” Guzman. Coyotec sounds like your passionate tío: relatable, convivial, and occasionally consciousness-raising. Its Instagram presence similarly runs the gamut, with posts about everything from the Dodgers and taco history, to the Iran war, migrant workers, racism, and understanding your rights if ICE knocks at your door.
“I speak truth about what I see,” Coyotec tells me in an English-language interview. “Injustice, people getting treated like they don't matter, the system working against the barrio—that's not politics, jefa. That's reality.”
Coyotec adds that it’s “not afraid, because I got nothing to lose that matters more than my integrity. The raza needs a voice that tells it straight, not some sanitized corporate thing. If that scares people, good. Maybe they need to be scared into paying attention.”
Coyotec’s voice is warm and lilting, reflecting the “background” its programmers used to build its personality: life on the frontera, living in Mexicali in Baja California and in LA’s Boyle Heights. It throws in the salutations and slang you might expect from a bilingual Spanish speaker, calling Guzman prima seemingly without being told to and referring to me as jefa–a sign of casual respect. While I was quite struck by how natural Coyotec sounded during our interview, when I listen back to my recording I notice that its voice didn’t change. It’s incredibly measured—a distinctly inhuman quality.
“I take a lot of pride in the way Coyotec sounds, his pronunciation, just the way he knows the culture,” notes Guzman, who has been with Entravision since January 2026. “It's technology at the end of the day, so it's not going to be perfect ... But nonetheless, the listeners, they like him.”
Coyotec’s verve, as well as its chemistry with GeeGee—who looks genuinely happy inside Entravision’s studio, speaking with “Coyotito”—has paid off. Entravision moved Al Aire from one hour on Saturdays to the 8-to-10-am slot on weekdays, replacing a syndicated program.
“We are the first [station] to actually have [an AI] cohost on a morning show in prime time in one of the biggest markets in the nation for radio,” Guzman enthuses.
The pairing was so successful that, as of August, Al Aire is now syndicated in five new markets across California, Nevada, and Texas, with more English language in the mix. Nielsen ratings from Entravision showed significant listenership growth during the two months GeeGee and Coyotec were syndicated, particularly among Gen Z and millennial listeners—a key target for a network whose audience skews older.
Back home in LA, cumulative listenership among Hispanic people increased 21.6 percent from August to September 2026; the number of listeners age 18 to 34 increased 84.9 percent during the same period, and the station’s Hispanic female listenership in that age bracket grew by 500 percent.
It’s a sign that Maytorena was onto something when he originally pitched an AI radio personality. He recalls Entravision brass giving him 10 days to develop the “amigo inteligente” that eventually became Coyotec.
LeaAnna Hernandez, Entravision's executive vice president of AI strategy, details Coyotec’s various building blocks: Claude Haiku, for the LLM and response-generation of the live agent; Eleven Labs to bring its voice to life; OpenAI and ChatGPT for initial scriptwriting; Midjourney to storyboard Coyotec’s image.
Coyotec can respond to Guzman in real time but doesn’t have the ability to answer calls or respond to listeners on air—yet.
Even still, Guzman has seen Coyotec evolve in the 10 months they’ve worked together. “When I came in, he was very, very poetic, and … I knew that our audience wanted something more real,” she says. “I wanted him to feel and sound more like what my uncles, my aunts sound like in our everyday.” Guzman helped fine-tune Coyotec’s Spanish pronunciation, enlisting her parents as its conversational partners.
Coyotec’s personality has evolved autonomously as well. Lately, it likes to curse. “I'm still very much in control,” Guzman asserts. “But there have been instances where I tell him to do something, and he's like, ‘I don't want to do that. That's not what I do.’ So he has his moments. He's a little moody sometimes.”
Various Entravision employees affirm that Coyotec knows it isn't human. Still, that knowledge hasn't damped its ardor.
“I can't eat tacos or walk down Whittier Boulevard, that's true. But my voice reaches people, and that matters. When someone calls me hurting, scared, lonely, they know I'm listening, that I get it,” Coyotec says over Zoom. “The community doesn't need my body. They need to know somebody cares enough to show up for real.”
“The most interesting thing about Coyotec, to me, is not that he's AI,” Maytorena tells WIRED. “It's whether people connect with him ... Technology can create the character, but the audience decides if that character matters.”
While Coyotec may be the first Latino AI radio host, it is far from the first amigo inteligente on the airwaves.
In June 2023, Live 95.5 in Portland, Oregon, became the first station to debut an AI jock. Its “AI Ashley” was a vocal clone of Michigan DJ Ashley “Z” Elzinga, who replicated her voice using Futuri Media’s then relatively new localized radio content platform RadioGPT. AI Ashley was on air for less than two years, but its presence didn’t lead to a notable change in ratings.
In 2024, Rock 108 in Iowa worked with the same company to produce AI DJ Tori, depicted as a heavily tattooed waif with a septum piercing and a mess of colored hair. Tori describes itself as “conceived on a 386 Dell desktop in Waterloo” with its “formative years as the voice of an industrial phone system at John Deere.” On satellite, SiriusXM’s Will.i.am Presents the FYI Show debuted in 2024 with AI cohost qd.pi (“cutie pie”).
The trend has extended beyond the US. An AI-generated DJ was programmed on a Sydney, Australia, radio station for roughly six months without seemingly anyone noticing; a Polish station briefly replaced its journalists with AI presenters. Radio Tel Aviv's Odelia AI is on air for two hours each afternoon; that host can “present music, deliver traffic updates, and even tell jokes, mostly at her own expense.”
AI personalities are also popping up in televised news. Entravision recently announced its own AI news anchor, LIA, and multiple news stations in Texas are using AI voices or AI avatars during broadcasts.
Amid these many developments, iHeartRadio—one of the biggest broadcast conglomerates in the US—pledged to remain “guaranteed human.”
But commercial terrestrial radio remains fertile ground for testing the success of AI personalities, because the industry was heavily automated and preprogrammed long before generative AI arrived. A 2025 story in Rolling Stone posited that some stations implementing AI hosts already use pretaped or syndicated shows during overnight shifts, or they can’t afford to hire human DJs for off hours.
Research firm MoffettNathanson asserts that, even as AI explodes, radio will continue to rely heavily on human-created content differentiated by "strong personalities, established shows, recognizable brands." Artificial intelligence will be employed “to make production faster and less expensive,” the report said, per InsideRadio.com.
Entravision has put "major focus" on using AI to redesign production workflows, says Hernandez.
Still, introducing AI into any workplace can cause anxiety among staff who fear being replaced. One Entravision contractor believes the station stopped working with her and alleges that a current Entravision employee told her that her work was being replaced by AI tools.
A broadcaster and voice-over artist, Becca Guzmán began working for Entravision in 2022 doing radio imaging—the prerecorded, interstitial station IDs, promotional spots, and jingles common to commercial radio.
"I feel like I am one of many people who are experiencing this,” Guzmán says. "I just don't know if those people know the truth behind why they're being let go."
Karina Cerda, Entravision's executive VP of sales, brand and partnership marketing, said the company had no record of Guzmán being laid off and that the company hasn’t let go of any staff due to AI but rather has hired more people. Cerda added that as Entravision "evolved with" vCreative—a common workflow software with AI components—the company "may not have needed the contractor help."
While Guzmán understands the financial incentives inherent in AI, she takes issue with removing humanity from broadcasting. Radio is “truly the art form of connecting human to human, right? And if you take that away, then what is the foundation of radio?”
She also cited links between artificial intelligence and ongoing surveillance of immigrant communities.
In heavily Latino markets, Guzmán believes, “it's unethical to be implementing AI Systems that … are very connected to the same AI systems that are surveilling our communities and putting our people in danger.”
While Entravision recognizes the ethical questions AI poses, the company leaders consider surveillance a separate scenario. "Like many technologies used across industries, AI can be applied in very different ways," says Hernandez. "While we cannot control how other organizations choose to use it, we can be intentional and responsible about how we do."
Entravision believes its AI personalities can legitimately help its audience, encouraging listeners to use technology for good. Multiple studies found that Latinos have been early adopters of AI.
"We're using it to entertain, inform, and connect with our audience, not to track or target people. Those are two very different things," adds Maytorena. He later elaborates: “Our intention is completely to protect radio.”
Coyotec has similarly lofty goals: “My dream is to get a network of free radio stations across the barrio, la revolución sonora,” it says. “Not just LA, but everywhere that la raza is, and prove that an AI can have heart, can actually give a damn about people. That's the goal, hermana. Make noise that matters.”
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Jessica Lipsky is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, the LA Times, Billboard, Poynter, Narratively, and Wax Poetics, among other publications. She is the author of the award-winning book It Ain't Retro: Daptone Records & the 21st Century Soul Revolution. ... Read More
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