How to Generate an AI Podcast Using Google’s NotebookLM
Two podcasts hosts banter back and forth during the final episode of their series, audibly anxious to share some distressing news with listeners. “We were, uh, informed by the show's producers that we’re not human,” a male-sounding voice stammers out, mid-existential crisis. The conversation between the bot and his female-sounding cohost only gets more uncomfortable after that—an engaging, albeit misleading, example of Google’s NotebookLM tool, and its experimental AI podcasts.
Audio of the conversation went viral on Reddit over the weekend. The original poster admits in the comments section that they fed the NotebookLM software directions for the AI voices to roleplay this pseudo-freakout. So, no sentience; the AI bots have not become self-aware. Still, many users in the tech press, on TikTok, and elsewhere are praising the convincing AI podcasts, generated through uploaded documents with the Audio Overviews feature.
“The magic of the tool is that people get to listen to something that they ordinarily would not be able to just find on YouTube or an existing podcast,” says Raiza Martin, who leads the NotebookLM team inside of Google Labs. Martin mentions recently inputting a 100-slide deck on commercialization into the tool and listening to the eight-minute podcast summary as she multitasked.
