Simon Willison’s Weblog
Audio Overview is a fun new feature of Google’s NotebookLM which is getting a lot of attention right now. It generates a one-off custom podcast against content you provide, where two AI hosts start up a “deep dive” discussion about the collected content. These last around ten minutes and are very podcast, with an astonishingly convincing audio back-and-forth conversation.
NotebookLM is effectively an end-user customizable RAG product. It lets you gather together multiple “sources”—documents, pasted text, links to web pages and YouTube videos—into a single interface where you can then use chat to ask questions of them. Under the hood it’s powered by their long-context Gemini 1.5 Pro LLM.
Thomas Wolf suggested “paste the url of your website/linkedin/bio in Google’s NotebookLM to get 8 min of realistically sounding deep congratulations for your life and achievements from a duo of podcast experts”. I couldn’t resist giving that a go, so I gave it the URLs to my about page and my Twenty years of my blog post and got back this 10m45s episode (transcript), which was so complimentary it made my British toes curl with embarrassment.
[...] What’s the key thing you think people should take away from Simon Willison? I think for me, it’s the power of consistency, curiosity, and just this like relentless desire to share what you learn. Like Simon’s journey, it’s a testament to the impact you can have when you approach technology with those values. It’s so true. He’s a builder. He’s a sharer. He’s a constant learner. And he never stops, which is inspiring in itself.
