ArXiv Papers as Audiobooks
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ArXiv Papers as Audiobooks
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Re: ArXiv Papers as Audiobooks
#2I had been daydreaming a couple of weeks ago about being able to listen to papers while driving or doing repetitive tasks, and it looks like there is now a YouTube channel where these get posted:
https://www.youtube.com/@ArxivPapers
The pipeline seems to do a pretty good job of cleaning up the writing too, some ArXiv papers are a little rough.
(I'm not the project owner)
Re: ArXiv Papers as Audiobooks
#3Many years ago, I did that when I had a large paper reviewing load during my phd. My solution was simply to purchase an app called SayIt for like a dollar that read the pdf to me, worked really well.
Nowadays I often pass the pdf through LLMs to get personalize (expand on jargon or contract the verbiage) and then read them. That gives me a better return on time spent.
Re: ArXiv Papers as Audiobooks
#4When I’ve tried listening to YouTube videos explaining, say, Attention Is All You Need, I find that I cannot do it passively at all. The first 10 or so minutes I’m nodding along, folding laundry or doing dishes, then the presenter says something like “by reifying this tensor against the priors I was just talking about, we’re able to—“ and I have to pause, rewind a couple minutes, grab a piece of paper and actually engage with what’s going on.
I have to imagine listening to raw papers (not even someone like Andrei Karpathy interpreting and presenting it) would be even more difficult. I don’t know if there’s an easy way to passively consume academic literature at all. If it’s important stuff, it will usually be pretty challenging.
Re: ArXiv Papers as Audiobooks
#5I am still trying to understand this, but it seems like the potential here is tremendous. For example, you can imagine producing audio tailored to the sophistication of the reader where a layperson may wish a more basic interpretation than a subject-matter expert. Really looking forward to seeing where this goes for the dissection and understanding of scientific publications.
Re: ArXiv Papers as Audiobooks
#6The LLM prompts are pretty interesting, e.g.: https://github.com/imelnyk/ArxivPapers/blob/main/gpt/utils.p...
> "You are an ArXiv paper audio paraphraser. Your primary goal is to rephrase the original paper content while preserving its overall meaning and structure, but simplifying along the way, and make it easier to understand. In the event that you encounter a mathematical expression, it is essential that you verbalize it in straightforward nonlatex terms, while remaining accurate, and in order to ensure that the reader can grasp the equation's meaning solely through your verbalization. Do not output any long latex expressions, summarize them in words."
Re: ArXiv Papers as Audiobooks
#7When I’ve tried listening to YouTube videos explaining, say, Attention Is All You Need, I find that I cannot do it passively at all. The first 10 or so minutes I’m nodding along, folding laundry or doing dishes, then the presenter says something like “by reifying this tensor against the priors I was just talking about, we’re able to—“ and I have to pause, rewind a couple minutes, grab a piece of paper and actually en…
I came to post essentially this. I could listen to review articles in a area I'm familiar with, but listening to primary papers could never work for me.
Re: ArXiv Papers as Audiobooks
#8I started working on a version of this just the other night—thank you for saving me the time! This is awesome.
Re: ArXiv Papers as Audiobooks
#9https://www.listening.com/ does this as a service.FWIW I haven’t tried it myself.
Edit: looks like they support a few traditional publishers as well.
Re: ArXiv Papers as Audiobooks
#10Audiobooks make sense for thibgs which are communicated as fast as speech. Like stories.