A lot happened this week. The interview module grew from a basic invite form into a full guest onboarding system with AI-drafted outreach and self-service scheduling. At the same time, a significant reliability push hardened how episodes move through the Mato distribution pipeline, closing gaps where episodes could appear published before they were truly live. Layer on top of that a comprehensive dark mode sweep, a rebuilt episode detail page, and a brand new marketing website — and it is fair to say this was one of the bigger weeks we have had.
New Features
Automated Interview Guest Onboarding
The interview invite flow has been transformed into a structured three-step wizard. Paste a guest's LinkedIn URL and their profile is automatically fetched and pre-filled. From there you can review their profile card, configure the interview, and send an AI-drafted outreach email written in your host's voice — all without leaving the page. Guests receive a dedicated scheduling page where they can pick a time, see available slots in their own timezone, and get a calendar invite sent automatically. Reminder emails fire at 24 hours, 1 hour, and 15 minutes before the call. The guest join experience has also been redesigned with a polished three-step flow covering welcome, profile confirmation, and a tech check before the session starts.
Live Episode Suggestion Feed on New Podcasts
When you create a new podcast, Mato kicks off a background job to generate episode ideas. Previously the overview page sat empty with no indication that anything was happening. Now a real-time indicator shows skeleton cards while ideas are being generated, then smoothly swaps them in the moment they are ready — no page refresh needed. If the job takes longer than expected, the page gracefully falls back to the manual episode creation prompt.
New V2 Marketing Website
The Mato marketing website has been completely rebuilt with 20 redesigned pages: a new homepage, product-specific feature pages for Studio, Analytics, Scheduling, Transcripts, the Embed Player, Multi-language support, Brand Controls, Clips, and Platforms distribution, plus sales pages including a Book Demo page with a themed booking form, Pricing, an ROI Calculator, and a Comparison page. The site uses a new shared design system with Mato coral accents, scroll-triggered animations, and a responsive layout across all breakpoints.
Companion Article Generation
From the episode detail page you can now generate a companion article for any episode. The article goes through a clear state flow — from idle to generating to draft to published — and surfaces a direct link to edit when it is ready.
Improvements
Rebuilt Episode Detail Page
The episode detail page has been redesigned into a two-column layout with a metadata panel on the left and tabbed content on the right. Distribution status badges now appear inline in the episode header and update in real time as the episode moves through the publishing pipeline. The Publish button responds immediately when clicked, flipping the status optimistically while the request completes in the background. A persistent side panel for transcript, show notes, analytics, sources, and questions stays mounted across tab switches so it does not reload when you move between tabs.
Dark Mode Across the App
A comprehensive sweep replaced hardcoded color values throughout the authenticated app — episode detail, settings, podcast list, billing, social content, and more — with semantic design tokens that respond correctly to the system theme. Form inputs, selects, and text areas now render with proper dark backgrounds. The script editor uses a slate palette that matches the app's dark background.
Redesigned App Sidebar
The sidebar navigation has been simplified to three top-level items: Home, Talent, and Social Content. Settings, Brands, Members, and Billing have moved into the workspace switcher dropdown. The podcast tree now uses display serif titles with colored letter-tile fallbacks when no cover art is present, and the selected row is highlighted with a coral left rule. The footer area shows a trial-days progress bar and an unlimited episodes indicator.
More Reliable Mato Distribution
The publish pipeline has been significantly hardened. Episodes now stay in a pre-public state until the entire Mato workflow — show sync, CDN upload, audio publish, and RSS feed regeneration — has completed. Stuck publish jobs are automatically detected and re-queued for recovery. A backfill workflow was also run to bring all existing episodes through the full Mato distribution path so public listings on heymato.com reflect the correct audio source.
Smarter AI Script Rewrites
The inline AI rewrite tool in the script editor now loads full context — podcast identity, episode details, host configuration, source material, and writing style — before generating suggestions. Rewrites stay constrained to the configured hosts and no longer produce impossible second-host lines for solo-host episodes.
Script Editor Autosave Polish
The script editor's autosave now pauses automatically while dropdowns, emotion chips, background sound pickers, and AI toolbar menus are open. After a successful save, the editor no longer reloads its content from the server if the saved text matches what is already on screen, eliminating an unnecessary flash.
Mato Settings Save Flow Fixed
Mato Distribution fields for owner contact information and website are now saved through the standard settings save bar, consistent with every other section on the settings page. The duplicate inline save controls that were shown on the redesigned settings page have been removed to avoid confusion.
Interview Episode Audio and Chapters
Interview episodes now produce the same metadata contract as standard scripted episodes. Chapter markers, section audio rows, and TipTap script JSON are all written to the database after generation, so the script editor, regeneration dialog, and chapter playback all work correctly for interview content.
Book Demo Page Styling
The Calendly booking widget on the demo page now renders with Mato brand colors instead of Calendly's default light theme. The iframe height has also been increased so the full booking form including the submit button is visible without inner scrolling.
Bug Fixes
Fixed episodes with a default script status being incorrectly blocked from showing the Publish button. The status field defaults to a value that is not "in progress," but the Publish CTA was treating it as if generation were underway.
Fixed the Regenerate audio button being hidden when it should have been visible. It now always appears when audio exists, and is disabled with a tooltip only when generation is actually in progress.
Fixed the podcast search filter in the sidebar always pinning the active podcast at the top of results, making search results misleading when the query did not match the current podcast.
Fixed interview episodes failing to generate audio for hosts using Gemini voices. The host voice selection was reading from the wrong field and treating a missing ElevenLabs voice ID as a fatal error even when a Gemini voice was correctly configured.
Fixed the Buzzsprout manual publish flow leaving episodes stuck in a pending state when the background job dispatch failed. The status now correctly rolls back to allow retrying.
Fixed the book-demo Calendly widget reverting to its default theme after a previous deploy removed the URL parameters that carry brand colors.
Fixed episodes being briefly exposed as public before the full distribution pipeline had finished. The publish workflow now commits the public-ready status only after every downstream step completes.