Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

illuminate.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 251 posts

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#171

Post by TranquilMarmot »

smusamashah wrote: post #16
TranquilMarmot wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the "Help" modal: "Illuminate is an experimental technology that uses AI to adapt content to your learning preferences. Illuminate generates audio with two AI-generated voices in conversation, discussing the key points of select papers. Illuminate is currently optimized for published computer science academic papers. As an experimental product, the generated audio with two AI-generated voices in conversation may…

Wow. I did not pick anything in the voice as a clue that it's generated. So does it make it current best text to audio system?

Really? Maybe I was just listening too hard to it and could hear it pretty well in some of the weird cadence and pacing.

If it was shorter audio and I wasn't prepared for it to be AI, it would definitely be harder to notice.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#173

Post by antimemetics »

TranquilMarmot wrote: post #168
dredmorbius wrote: post #125

Earlier 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…

Those are some good use cases. I only really listen to full-length audiobooks and not podcasts. An AI voice is probably sufficient, especially for niche content, but I would MUCH rather listen to a book narrated by a human. There are nuances to pacing, tone, and voice that I don't think AI will ever be able to fully grasp.

I listened to a lot of current AI „podcasting“ tools and wh ok me the voice is 95% perfect it does have its issues: - suddenly speeding up or slowing down - mispronunciation of non-standard words - weird pauses

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#174

Post by yangcheng »

nxobject wrote: post #24

A 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!

Thanks for sharing! would be super nice if notebooklm can automatically include reference papers from a single paper.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#175

Post by GeoAtreides »

leobg wrote: post #89

I made something like this for my kids: 1. Take a science book. I used one Einstein loved as a kid, in German. But I can also use Asimov in English. Or anything else. We’ll handle language and outdated information on the LLM level. 2. Extract the core ideas and narrative with an LLM and rewrite it into a conversation, say, between a curious 7 year old girl and her dad. We can take into account what my kids are intere…

Why wouldn't you just let the kid read (not listen) the book on their own and then have a conversation with them about it?

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#176

Post by gherkinnn »

vincentpants wrote: post #103

Listening to an AI generated discussion-based podcast on the topic of anticipating the scraping of deceased people's digital footprint to create an AI copy of your loved one makes the cells that make up my body want to give up on fighting entropy.

I often thought Black Mirror was a bit too much.

And before you know it, there is a story of David Cameron diddling a pig's head in his youth and now our deceased are being brought back to life.

Charlie Brooker was ahead of us all.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#177

Post by sagarpatil »

nxobject wrote: post #24

A 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!

With Google's 1 million token and Sonnet 3.5's 200,000 token limit, is there any advantage of using this over just uploading the pdf files and ask questions about it. I was under the impression that you will get more accurate results by adding the data in chat.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#178

Post by totetsu »

phemartin wrote: post #67
culi wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not a podcast, but I've often wished I could listen to a paper or an article while on a long drive

You may enjoy the product I've been working on...[0] it lets you listen to articles and subscribe to any website. [0] https://playtext.app

I would love an RSVP reader mode for this.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#180

Post by netdevnet »

freefaler wrote: post #3

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.

Soon. Maybe even fully auto generated content where spammers prompt an LLM and the end product is a bunch of audio files
Post reply on HN