I put together a whole bunch of notes on the new "Audio Overview" feature of Google's NotebookLM, where you can dump a bunch of source documents in and get a ~10m long utterly weird (and surprisingly convincing) artificial podcast episode generated whe...
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I put together a whole bunch of notes on the new "Audio Overview" feature of Google's NotebookLM, where you can dump a bunch of source documents in and get a ~10m long utterly weird (and surprisingly convincing) artificial podcast episode generated where two AI characters perform a "deep dive" conversation about those sources https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/29/notebooklm-audio-overview/
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Simon Willisonreplied to Simon Willison last edited by
Don't miss this example where someone got "the producers" to tell them they were AI, resulting in a weird kind of existential crisis https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooklm/comments/1fr31h8/notebooklm_podcast_hosts_discover_theyre_ai_not/
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Jerome (He/Him)replied to Simon Willison last edited by
@simon setting aside the existential crisis bit, Iām genuinely surprised at how interesting this AI generated content is
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Simon Willisonreplied to Jerome (He/Him) last edited by
@jeromechoo itās pretty astonishing - it does somehow manage to elevate the content, and the human-ness of the conversation is just beyond the uncanny valley for me, itās actually pleasant to listen to
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Simon Willisonreplied to Simon Willison last edited by
... OK, I couldn't resist: I fed my article about NotebookLM back into NotebookLM and got it to make a podcast about the article about its podcasting, and the result was SO satisfying https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/29/notebooklm-audio-overview/#turtles-all-the-way-down
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Christopher Bailey :python:replied to Simon Willison last edited by
@simon The host sounds like it was trained on Leo LaPorte TWIT, not sure who the female voice is.
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Simon Willisonreplied to Christopher Bailey :python: last edited by
@digiglean both hosts are giving me āgeneric Californianā vibes to be honest - they even sound a bit like our local Californian morning radio hosts
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@simon I always think about Alan Kay who would talk aboutāGutenberg had 250+ types to reproduce all the little flourishes that priests would add to their hand-copied books. Kay used that as a metaphor for how, whenever new technology emerges, itās first used to solve the problems (or in this case āproblemsā) of the past before solving problems of the future. (Other examples of this are like, the first iPhone apps slavishly mimicking the physical substrate of notebooks or ledgers.)
I realize that as tech demos go, the podcast generator thing is likely mostly marketing flex, but it reminds me so much of all the little hand-written flourishes
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@22 I love that comparison - Gutenberg flourishes and speech disfluencies