NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective
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Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective
#2I just made a podcast episode about my company where I work by giving it the website. It was surprisingly realistic. It also made me realize how empty many podcasts actually are.
I sent it to my colleagues telling them I "had it produced." I'll reveal the truth tomorrow.
Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective
#3I don’t think this is all that impressive, the generated podcast is pretty shallow - lots of ‘whoa meta’ and the word ‘like’ thrown into every sentence.
Yes, it will generate a middle-of-the-road waffling podcast, but not one with any real depth.
Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective
#4Related discussion NotebookLM is quite powerful and worth playing with (54 points, 11 hours ago, 21 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41688804
Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective
#5I don’t think this is all that impressive, the generated podcast is pretty shallow - lots of ‘whoa meta’ and the word ‘like’ thrown into every sentence. Yes, it will generate a middle-of-the-road waffling podcast, but not one with any real depth.
I was blown away by how impressive it was. I honestly thought it was real. I still can't believe these realistic audio capabilities are not being used for pure evil everywhere we look.
> like thrown into every sentence
I think that's actually part of why it sounds real, because tons of people do actually talk like that.
To me what would make it even better is the ability to throw in random jokes and utilize information about their surroundings and recent events.
I have been using MeloTTS for text-to-speech and I thought that was about the best we could do right now, but apparently I was very wrong. Is there an offline model one can download today that sounds as good as this NotebookLM?
Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective
#6I don’t think this is all that impressive, the generated podcast is pretty shallow - lots of ‘whoa meta’ and the word ‘like’ thrown into every sentence. Yes, it will generate a middle-of-the-road waffling podcast, but not one with any real depth.
It already feels more nuanced than the usual podcast.
Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective
#7I don’t think this is all that impressive, the generated podcast is pretty shallow - lots of ‘whoa meta’ and the word ‘like’ thrown into every sentence. Yes, it will generate a middle-of-the-road waffling podcast, but not one with any real depth.
This was exactly my reaction to listening to the example podcast. Although, I wonder if the base material weren't so meta-level product overview, maybe it would be better. I do think the liveliness of the conversation was good (interjections, tonal variety, etc), so at least parts of the demo are impressive.
Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective
#8I just made a podcast episode about my company where I work by giving it the website. It was surprisingly realistic. It also made me realize how empty many podcasts actually are. I sent it to my colleagues telling them I "had it produced." I'll reveal the truth tomorrow.
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Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective
#9I don’t think this is all that impressive, the generated podcast is pretty shallow - lots of ‘whoa meta’ and the word ‘like’ thrown into every sentence. Yes, it will generate a middle-of-the-road waffling podcast, but not one with any real depth.
The content is nothing that special these days, you could get it out of Gemini or Claude probably- but the audio affect is awfully convincing.
You can compare it to Google's Illuminate which also generates conversations by summarizing texts but in a much straighter, less fluffy way. It's less shallow but in some ways less compelling:
Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective
#10This is impressive from a technical point of view and probably useful from an educational one; I really like the idea that a piece of text can be transformed into any kind of media format easily, depending on your preferences. As recently as a year ago I was using Apple’s text to speech tool to listen to Wikipedia articles while biking, and needless to say, they weren’t very exciting to listen to.
But I don’t think it’s much of a threat to actual podcasts, which tend to be successful because of the personalities of the hosts and guests, and not because of the information they contain.
Which leads me to hope that the next versions of Notebook will allow more customization of the speakers’ voices, tone, education level, etc.