José FM, a Spanish-language station owned by Entravision and heard at 97.5 FM in Los Angeles and 107.1 in Burbank, now runs a weekday morning show with an AI co-host. The host, Geraldine "GeeGee" Guzman, shares the microphone with Coyotec, a synthetic personality whose show moved from a weekend slot into weekday drive time, 8 to 10am Pacific. Entravision says audience figures among Latino men have risen since.
Coyotec's name blends "coyote" and "technology". Its voice was built on ElevenLabs from the voice of Eduardo Maytorena, president of Entravision Audio, and its visual persona is a Latino man in his thirties with a moustache and leather jacket. It began in September 2025 as a scripted bit, went fully live in May 2026, and the show doubled to two hours in April. It is now also broadcast in English and has been taken to other markets, among them Sacramento, Las Vegas and El Paso. Listeners are told over and over that they are hearing an AI.
“An AI avatar has neither embodied knowledge nor a stake”
Sam Gregory, synthetic media expert and visiting scholar, American University, to the Los Angeles Times · newstribune.com ↗
Entravision's Nielsen numbers show the weekly audience of Hispanic men aged 25 to 54 up 75% from March to April 2026, against 4% for the Hispanic market overall. Men 18 to 49 rose 59% and men 18 to 34 rose 53%. One trade report adds a caution: the station's overall Los Angeles ratings have trended slightly down in recent months, and the coverage does not settle whether the gains come from the host or the AI. The outlets also differ on the signal, one placing José in Los Angeles and Burbank, the other calling it a Riverside-San Bernardino station that reaches the LA basin.
Working with it takes effort. Guzman feeds the software news and topics, and because Coyotec struggles with chats longer than about ten minutes she records four segments separately. It sometimes swears and has to be told to stop. She calls the work rewarding but unpredictable and says its popularity helps create jobs. Maytorena says cost is not the point: building and running it costs more than some human hosts, though programmed ad reads earn roughly ten times what is spent.
Radio workers are unconvinced. SAG-AFTRA says synthetic substitutes deceive audiences and threaten livelihoods, and DJ John DeSantis, laid off last month from KCAL-FM, argues no AI can match live local connection. Federal figures show US radio jobs falling from 85,000 in 2019 to 66,000 in 2025, about 22%, while iHeartMedia, Audacy and Cumulus cut DJs and automate.
The experiment sits among others. Portland's AI DJ was dropped last year, Iowa's KFMW uses one overnight, and a Phoenix station launched an all-AI lineup in January. iHeartMedia banned AI on-air personalities in December 2025. Entravision, which reports $447 million in revenue and also fields an AI TV anchor, plans to keep expanding the format.
Trade outlet RBR calls Coyotec the first AI-generated Spanish-language personality and the third major full-time AI on-air deployment in US radio. The persona was first conceived when on-air talent hesitated to speak out during Los Angeles immigration raids, and it is styled a "trafficker of truth".