Generative AI is great as summarising stuff. What NotebookLM does is create a useful summary, wrapped in a human-like voice discussion, so it seems authentic and approachable.
While so many have been surprised at how good this tool is—and it certainly is good at what it's been trained to do—I find it akin to a more frustrating version of the text summaries GenAI has been able to do for ages. And those summaries can be created to suit the user's requirements, while the NotebookLM audio deep dive is a single button to generate the audio.
That makes a lot of sense to me. I have definitely used a variety of tools for summaries but this is the first "podcast style" audio that I've seen which I think can be an appealing option when trying to get other people interested via a summary. I'm curious to see where it will go as the tech develops.
I took the transcription of the audio and got a text output of the summary as a John Oliver-style monologue. It had some overuse of the same comments about yarn, but I could well imagine Oliver delivering most of the summary.
By the time I listened today, I had forgotten that this was AI generated 😂. There wasn’t an opening intro, which I found odd, but the two voices played well off each other and were informative.
loved the topic and started really listening not realising it was AI generated!! So weird - a little bit too slick to be real but I would never have guessed..
@Charlie Guo Any thoughts on how popular this suddenly got in the last few days?
I tried, but those *voices* - boy, they grate!
Oh interesting - the voices didn’t bother me at all. But that’s good to know.
Generative AI is great as summarising stuff. What NotebookLM does is create a useful summary, wrapped in a human-like voice discussion, so it seems authentic and approachable.
While so many have been surprised at how good this tool is—and it certainly is good at what it's been trained to do—I find it akin to a more frustrating version of the text summaries GenAI has been able to do for ages. And those summaries can be created to suit the user's requirements, while the NotebookLM audio deep dive is a single button to generate the audio.
That makes a lot of sense to me. I have definitely used a variety of tools for summaries but this is the first "podcast style" audio that I've seen which I think can be an appealing option when trying to get other people interested via a summary. I'm curious to see where it will go as the tech develops.
I took the transcription of the audio and got a text output of the summary as a John Oliver-style monologue. It had some overuse of the same comments about yarn, but I could well imagine Oliver delivering most of the summary.
By the time I listened today, I had forgotten that this was AI generated 😂. There wasn’t an opening intro, which I found odd, but the two voices played well off each other and were informative.
loved the topic and started really listening not realising it was AI generated!! So weird - a little bit too slick to be real but I would never have guessed..
Thanks for checking it out. They did a really good job of summarizing my book Crochet Saved My Life. 🩷