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Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

illuminate.google.com

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Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#201

Post by wholinator2 »

culi wrote: post #39
TranquilMarmot wrote: post #8

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.

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

I've also been really interests in finding a way to make ai tts able to read equations. I'm currently pursuing my phd in physics and i listen to tts of textbooks in the gym. There just aren't human podcasts over the thing i need to learn right now for class, but if that dang tts could only read equations I'd be set!

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#202

Post by nxobject »

timmg wrote: post #138
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!

You also might find a similar feature arriving in that product.. soon.

Glad to see it’s being actively worked on!

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#204

Post by maroonblazer »

spencerchubb wrote: post #197
vanishingbee wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You left this out "The transformer processes the entire sequence all at once by using something called self attention"

This is the very next sentence, so it is a little odd that "hence the title" comes before, and not after, "...using something called self attention."

My take is these are nitpicks though. I can't count the number of podcasts I've listened to where the subject is my area of expertise and I find mistakes or misinterpretations at the margins, where basically 90% or more of the content is accurate.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#205

Post by leobg »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #175
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?

Because it may be in another language or aimed at another audience beyond my kid’s reading level.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#206

Post by bemmu »

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.

I made one for fun last year. It was quite easy to get two hosts talking to each other in a natural manner. It's just a python script where I tell it which Reddit discussion or other topic to make an episode segment about, and it works fine as long as I cherry-picked out of a few generations.

Here's an example segment, demonstrating an extra feature where they can call an expert to weigh in on whatever they are talking about: https://soundcloud.com/bemmu/19animals

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#207

Post by eitally »

dredmorbius wrote: post #125
TranquilMarmot wrote: post #8

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.

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…

I read the first of The Three Body Problem trilogy in print, and then listened to audiobook versions of the second & third books. Only they weren't audiobooks. I downloaded PDFs and then used a mobile app (Librera, I believe) to "read" them to me while I exercised. The benefit is that it allows arbitrary text to be converted to audio, but the downside is that it's only able to use your device's TTS voices, and there aren't any AI smarts built-in, so it was like listening to the Google Assistant read an audiobook. It got the job done, but now I have a somewhat visceral reaction to that Assistant voice having associated it with Chinese sci-fi for several weeks.

Something better would be very much appreciated. It's still not a replacement for high quality, professionally narrated audiobooks, but -- like you said, it's not just books that I'd like to consume this way.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#209

Post by lordswork »

lasermike026 wrote: post #199

While this is very nice what I need is my computer to take voice commands, read content in various formats and structure, and take dictation for all of my apps. I need this in my phone too. I can do this now but I have to use a bunch of different tools that don't work seamless together. I need the Voice and Conversational User Interface that is built into the operating system.

That sounds like a great broader vision, but let's also celebrate the significant step in that direction that this work presents. This appears to be very useful as is.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#210

Post by falcor84 »

hliyan wrote: post #181
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.

I'm conflicted about this. On one hand, it makes content more accessible to a larger audience. On the other hand, it leverages copyrighted material without crediting or compensating creators, potentially puts those same creators out of work, and finally, reduces the likelihood of more such (human) creators arising in the future. My worry is that a few generations hence, human beings will forget many skills like this,…

I reread it now[0], and while I remembered the premise, I totally forgot about this part at the end, giving them a practical motivation for manual calculations:

"A ship that can navigate space without a computer on board can be constructed in one-fifth the time and at one-tenth the expense of a computer-laden ship. We could build fleets five time, ten times, as great as Deneb could if we could but eliminate the computer."

But this of course is nonsensical with current technology, same as it would be nonsensical to go back to manual agriculture or manual manufacturing - we can achieve so much more with our tools than without them. And the way I see it, as long as we have an incentive to advance the state of the art, people will have an incentive (and curiosity) to learn how we got where we are, so that they could push the envelope.

[0] https://ia803006.us.archive.org/6/items/TheFeelingOfPower/Th...

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