I got in the beta a couple weeks ago and tried it out on some papers [0]
Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio
131–140 of 251 posts
Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio
#132I've been meaning be the all you need is attention paper for yours and never have. And I finally listened to that little generated interview as their first example. I think this is going to be very very useful to me!
Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio
#133I guess I am in my grouchy old person phase but all I could think of what the Gilfoyle quote from Silicon Valley when presented with a talking refrigerator. > "Bad enough it has to talk, does it need fake vocal tics...?" - Gilfoyle Found it: https://youtu.be/APlmfdbjmUY?si=b4-rgkxeXigU_un_&t=179
I would want to select a voice without vocal fry, which one of the voices in these demos has.
Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I listen to a number of podcasts which are reading books, stories, literature, etc. Having a professional actor read a text has appeal (e.g., Selected Shorts ), but many are less-than-professional. A sufficiently-competent automated text-to-speech would fit at least some roles. There are a few podcasts for which I'd have greater interest if the narration were by someone other than the current host.... There are also…
What are your favourites? A podcast curating great short stories sounds interesting, done well
"Selected Shorts" is up there. My principle complaint is that episodes remain live for only a month or so. If you happen to catch an episode you like you'll have to keep it downloaded. All but certainly on account of copyright.
Various non-English pods as well, to maintain / increase fluency. Germany has a good set via Deutschlandfunk. I've found a few in other languages, though tending toward advertising-supported, which is less than ideal.
Searching for stories, literature, childrens' stories (a surprisingly good way to learn basic vocabulary, grammar, and culture), and history in your target language of choice tends to be a pretty good guide.
Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio
#135Great 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
This is a bit meta for me. A year ago a website was posted on here HN which allowed you to visit a random website with an /ideas page. For some reason it would always land me on the same website, which outlined something close to this. The idea was something like an RSS feed that would summarize all the entries in the feed for the day/weekin the form of a podcast.
I wonder if that was inspiration for Wondercraft.
Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio
#136I listened to multiple demos, the pauses and vocal intonations sound so fake. They’re inserted at odd times that a real human speaker would not.
Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the same way that corporations are people, my friend, AI-generated and AI-voiced summaries of works by real people are also people, my friend.
I don't think we're friends, bot...
You called a long term user a bot in the most rude way imaginable. Not only are you bad at spotting bots, but you’re rude about it for no reason. Good for you - you must feel very accomplished.
Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio
#138A related experiment from Google: NotebookLM (notebooklm.google.com), which takes a group of documents and provides a RAG Gemini chatbot in return. I wish Google would make these experiments more well-known!
You also might find a similar feature arriving in that product.. soon.
Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio
#139One 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.
Happens in the very first example: [Attention is All You Need - 1:07] > Voice A: How did the "Attention is All You Need" paper address this sequential processing bottleneck of RNNs? > Voice B: So, instead of going step-by-step like RNNs, they introduced a model called the Transformer - hence the title. What title? The paper is entitled "Attention is All You Need". People are fooling themselves. These are stochastic p…
I recently listened to this great episode of "This American Life" [1] which talked about this very subject. It was released in June 2023 which might be ancient history in terms of AI. But it discusses whether LLMs are just parrots and is a nice episode intended for general audiences so it is pretty enjoyable. But experts are interviewed so it also seems authoritative.
[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/803/greetings-people-of-ear...
Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio
#140Great 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.
Would you listen to an auto-generated podcast? Seems like removing the humans from the equation kind of defeats the purpose.
Lex Friedman invites guests to just repeat whatever nonsense they write on their blogs without questioning any of the questionable claims, and plenty of people listen to it. This technology would be perfect for his podcast.