Google is using AI to make fake podcasts from your research

Google tin present turn your probe into an AI-generated podcast, implicit with 2 “hosts” that sermon what you’ve dug up. The experimental diagnostic lives wrong NotebookLM, the AI note-taking app Google launched past year, and volition person AI hosts “summarize your material, marque connections betwixt topics, and banter backmost and forth.”

It’s meant to physique connected NotebookLM’s existing features that help you interact with each your notes, transcripts, and different probe documents. The app already uses Google’s Gemini AI exemplary to assistance summarize your research, and this is benignant of similar an audio mentation of that.

Google isn’t making things up erstwhile it says the AI hosts volition “banter” with each other, either. When trying retired Audio Overview for myself, I plugged successful 1 of the illustration notebooks astir the invention of the lightbulb, and the results were... a spot uncanny. During the 10-minute-long overview, the 2 hosts had a lighthearted treatment astir however Thomas Edison wasn’t the lone idiosyncratic down the lightbulb and that “in the end, it’s really a communicative astir teamwork, making the imagination work.”

The hosts could almost beryllium mistaken for quality podcasters, from the mode they emphasized “bam!” erstwhile tossing it successful the mediate of a sentence, to utilizing modern phrasing similar “messy arsenic heck.” There were inactive a mates of quirks, arsenic I noticed the AI spelling retired definite words and phrases, similar “P-L-U-S.” Some of the penning wasn’t precisely what a quality would say, either, with 1 AI big calling platinum “bling bling metal.”

The diagnostic makes learning astir probe much engaging, but I’m wondering whether the hosts would support their lighthearted, somewhat jokey code erstwhile discussing much superior topics, similar crab oregon war. There’s rather a spot of filler during the speech arsenic well, truthful it mightiness not beryllium the champion mode to rapidly and intelligibly distill each your information. That’s thing Google mentions successful its announcement, arsenic it says the diagnostic is “not a broad oregon nonsubjective presumption of a topic, but simply a reflection” of your notes.

There are immoderate different limitations to Audio Overview arsenic well, arsenic Google says it could instrumentality respective minutes to make a podcast-like discussion, and it’s lone disposable successful English. Like galore AI tools, it isn’t ever accurate.

You tin effort retired the diagnostic for yourself by opening up a notebook in NotebookLM. From there, prime the Notebook usher successful the bottom-right country of the screen, and past deed Load beneath the “Audio Overview” heading. I cognize I’m going to beryllium doing immoderate probe connected a random taxable conscionable truthful I tin perceive what the AI podcasters person to say.