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Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

illuminate.google.com

41–50 of 251 posts

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#41
What does this accomplish? Who does this help? How does this make the world a better place?

This only seems like it would be useful for spammers trying to game platforms, which is silly because spam is probably the number one thing bringing down the quality of Google's own products and services.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#42
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you listen to an auto-generated podcast? Seems like removing the humans from the equation kind of defeats the purpose.

Depends on the what you are trying to get out of a podcast. Most of the podcasts I listen to are because I want to learn something new in an entertaining format. I'm not listening to develop parasocial relationships with the hosts, so removing that element could be a good thing for me. Of course if you listen to podcasts because you like the parasocial aspect or the celebrity interviews, then yeah... Not really a poi…

I don't know that "parasocial relationships" are the primary reason people like having real hosts. I have a huge list of things I've managed to change in my life because I heard some other real person talking about how they were possible. Listening to these people over time and realizing there's nothing about them that's so special that it makes things possible for them that aren't possible for me gets me off my butt to set about the hard work of making the changes I didn't otherwise realize were possible.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#43

Great idea. I wonder how long until we'd see a lot of "autogenerated" podcasts with syndicated advertising inside spamming the podcast space. Like with robovoiced videos on YT reading some scraped content.

Wondercraft have been offering this service for a while, and produce some of their own auto-generated podcasts including the Hacker News Recap which does an excellent job of summarizing the most engaged posts on HN. https://www.wondercraft.ai/our-podcasts

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn’t have been trusting podcasts in the first place, Joe Rogan says plenty of false things no AI required.

Sure, but now now I – an idiot – can publish a podcast on... "Bayesian Multilevel Models," and fool almost everyone into thinking I know anything about it. I've seen YouTubers provide tutorials on auto-creating YouTube videos and podcast episodes on niche scientific subjects, on how to build seemingly-reputable brands with zero ongoing effort. That is all totally novel. Being able to lie or be wrong before is orthogo…

Scale has already been achieved with money (advertisement revenue) and influence (politics agendas, fame) on a viral platform.

What this tech brings is speed. If Google did it, someone else will also do it.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#45
I think I just discovered a new emotion. Simultaneous feelings of excitement and disappointment.

No matter how great the idea, it's hard to stay excited for more than a few microseconds at the sight of the word "Google". I can already hear the gravediggers shovels preparing a plot in the Google graveyard, and hear the sobs of the people who built their lives, workflows, even jobs and businesses around something that will be tossed aside as soon as it stops being someone's pet play-thing at Google.

A strange ambivalent feeling of hope already tarnished with tragedy.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you listen to an auto-generated podcast? Seems like removing the humans from the equation kind of defeats the purpose.

Being auto-generated is not the problem. I listen to a lot of text-to-speech voiced articles and epub books now. The problem is that filtering/searching on that massive catalog and weeding the useless stuff out.

Are you doing that with "old-fashioned" TTS, or have you found a good resource for uploading your own docs/epubs and having them read back by one of these higher quality synthesized voices? (I've been looking for the latter, but not having much luck.)

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#47
post #5

The voice models for this are very good. I'd love to have granular control over the output of a model like this locally.

Like SSML? See azure tts or google cloud tts, or ibm Watson or even old school system tts like SAPI voices on windows. But I hear you. In a VITS typical model system ssml isn’t standard. Piper tts does have it on the roadmap.

I just want programmable prosody. Prosodic controls would allow much more believable TTS - apple used to have it on the earlier TTS models, but these new TTS models sound so natural at the phoneme level, but the prosody is often jacked up so that it's easily identifiable as artificial.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#48
post #12

One problem I see with this is legitimizing LLM-extracted content as canon. The realistic human speech masks the fact that the LLM might be hallucinating or highlighting the wrong parts of a book/paper as important.

The top list of Apple Podcasts is full of real humans intentionally lying or manipulating information, it makes me worry much less about computer generated lies

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#49
We are working on something content driven (for an ad or subscription model) with lot of effort and time and I am concerned how this technology will affect all that effort and eventually monetization ideas. But I can see how helpful this tool can be for learning new stuff.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#50

Great idea. I wonder how long until we'd see a lot of "autogenerated" podcasts with syndicated advertising inside spamming the podcast space. Like with robovoiced videos on YT reading some scraped content.

I hate the robo voiced videos. I watch a lot of space content and run into them often on the homepage. Usually easy to spot with low views and 1k subs.
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