Maximum Effort, Minimum Reward
There’s something so validating about hearing an AI-generated NPR podcast host cover articles you wrote and say “woooOOOOOoooow.” It really feels like you’ve made it.
I’ve been playing with NotebookLM recently, which is Google’s new AI note-taking tool. Its basic functionality lets you to upload “sources,” — text files, .pdfs, etc. — aggregate that information, and allow you to ask questions about those sources to a large language model (LLM). Claude, another LLM from Anthropic, has a similar feature called “Projects” that I absolutely love. But one thing that makes NotebookLM really stand out is the “Audio Overview/Deep Dive” feature.
The Deep Dive/Audio Overview feature essentially generates a podcast episode about your sources, and it absolutely nails the NPR podcast style. It is so similar that it’s eerie — There’s two hosts, one male and one female, with classic “American media” accents, who have a back and forth conversation about your topic at the level of a general audience (complete with bad jokes, correctly-timed laughter, and ham-fisted metaphors). The voices are tuned to mimic the exact style of vocal modulation that will be instantly recognizable to anyone who listens to e.g. Planet Money. The AI hosts have all the vocal quirks of podcasting, including overuse of descriptors like “mindblowing,” “wild,” and saying “get this” before introducing a new factoid, and “you’ve got it, you’re catching on” afterwards.
In fact there are actually two new Google tools, Google Illuminate being the other one, that generate audio overviews. Google Illuminate is slightly different in focus and features, as it only allows you to input scientific publications from ArXiv and a few other websites, and allows you to tailor the audio overview to general audiences, experts, beginners, etc. It also allows you to set the tone, and “semi-professional” seems to be the default.
