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Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

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Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#92
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 We’ll handle language and outdated information on the LLM level. 2.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…

How do you get the source data (text) from a book? To me it is the major roadblock for LLM-based commercial content consumption.

Old books are on Gutenberg, archive.org etc.

Physical ones, I scan. Cutting the spine is easiest. But today you can also just take pics with your phone.

Many retailers also sell EPUB. Which is just HTML.

Obviously, that’s all for private consumption only. (Unless you’re OpenAI I guess. :-P)

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#94

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.

This sounds too good. It's not too far away from me having a hard time wondering "is it just overly scripted corporate PR podcast".

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#96
post #39

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

Lookup podgenai.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#97

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.

That low-quality stuff has no relation to high-quality AI created content.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#98
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you get the source data (text) from a book? To me it is the major roadblock for LLM-based commercial content consumption.

Old books are on Gutenberg, archive.org etc. Physical ones, I scan. Cutting the spine is easiest. But today you can also just take pics with your phone. Many retailers also sell EPUB. Which is just HTML. Obviously, that’s all for private consumption only. (Unless you’re OpenAI I guess. :-P)

Oh you gotta serious! Salute to you from a lazy dad.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#99
Books I can understand, but I'm genuinely curious: would anyone here find it useful to hear scientific papers as narrated audio? Maybe it depends on the field, but when I read e.g. an ML paper, I almost always have to go through it line-by-line with a pen and scratchpad, jumping back and forth and taking notes, to be sure I've actually "got it". Sometimes I might read a paragraph a dozen times. I can't see myself getting any value out of this, but I'm interested if others would find it useful.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#100

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.

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

I have been listening to podgenai for the past three+ months. The point is to listen selectively to only the topics or titles that interest you.
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