Google's NotebookLM is getting quite a bit of interest these days, maybe not so much for what the artificial intelligence (AI) powered tool is actually meant for, but for its ability to generate "podcasts" automagically. NotebookLM is powered by Google's Gemini AI.
The effervescent Michael "MOD" O'Donnell of TradeMe and other digital companies fame even suggested NotebookLM will kill off the podcast industry. That's quite a claim, but MOD does know a thing or two about technology (he was a good boy who listened to what I said when we worked in the same organisation and learnt a lot), so without further ado, here's what NotebookLM made out of my last three stories here:
There's only one word for that, and it's: impressive.
What's missing before we can mourn the death of the podcast industry?
- The ability to pick different voices, languages and ugh, other accents.
- Cloning your own voice for podcasts.
- Better quality audio - the downloaded sound file is a 24 kb WAV in mono.
- Being able to edit the "podcast". There's no control over it at the moment, although I haven't done a total deep dive yet.
- The usual podcast bling like sound effects and background music.
- Plus other things that I didn't think of because I don't edit podcasts for a living.
Other than that though, being able to provide source material via Google Drive docs, or weblinks (which didn't work in my test) makes it pretty easy. I'm saying that, looking at the NotebookLM interface which follows Google's long established tradition of making apps cryptic and user-hostile.
All the things I've listed above are easily fixable with some development work. I wouldn't be surprised if it's been done already so please let me know in the comments if so.
Being curious, I tried out the quite expensive to use wondercraft.ai site, which among other things lets you create podcasts from text. Sort of. Wondercraft read out a story in a voice I didn't like all that much, but is OK and which sounds like this. You can clone your voice on Wondercraft, but while it lets you add music and SFX, it doesn't seem able to create that natural sounding and fluent NotebookLM "podcast".
ElevenLabs can also clone your voice, and here's "Adam the AI" reading out the Friday Tech Roundup piece in a pretty reasonable way.
If you clone your voice and train an AI on it to read things out, is it still you? Or something else? See also: banks using voice recognition to authenticate customers looking very worried.
8 Comments
These podcast generators are brilliant! I fed my resume into it and the same voice pair above discuss how amazing I am and how any company would be truly blessed to have me work for them. Great for the ego. And their insights are very interesting.
You can feed in any source material or even just an idea and a high qualith podcast will be generated within minutes. I didn't explore using different voices/accents or using my own voice, but that would be a lot of fun to play with.
AI is very clever but also very concerning and will have a massive but unknown impact on life as we know it.
I have have been playing with MidJourney image creation for two years now and it is stunning. It will and has put so many artists and designers out of work. It makes me think that no one will bother with originality, just rehash the past.
Today I have been using NotebookLM to sort out a complex legal case I'm involved in. I fed in the plaintiff's case and their affadavit as source documents then added the relevant sections of NZ law that were applicable. The app has translated the legal jargon into simple English, given me the precedents for such cases and analysed what the arguments are for and against. This all took me less than an hour to do on my phone. I still have a lot more work to do but I am looking forward to getting out my laptop and attacking this in depth. Then I will get legal advice to ensure my ducks line up. It hopefully will save me a lot of money and give me a very good understanding of what I need to produce to defend my case. I know I will have to verify anything AI comes up with, but that is easy enough to do.
While it's true that Notebook LM can create lifelike podcasts, it's real value in my mind is as a research tool.
You can upload up to 1000 documents on a particular topic, Notebook LM will then summarise those into one concise synopsis. You can then ask it questions about that topic so for example you can upload several financial reports by different authorities about say NZ banking regulations and you are then able to quiz the program about any aspect of that subject.
I think it may expand the supply of podcasts, but that will just be noise. As a human, I'm interested in listening to humans. Podcast (and radio) hosts form somewhat of an intimate relationship with listeners. After a while, they feel like friends even if it is one-way. But this only happens because you're listening to other people. Take the human element away, then why bother listening? Does anybody enjoy conversing with say Meta AI on their phone? No. It's a useful reference and productivity tool, but it's not fun.
We welcome your comments below. If you are not already registered, please register to comment.
Remember we welcome robust, respectful and insightful debate. We don't welcome abusive or defamatory comments and will de-register those repeatedly making such comments. Our current comment policy is here.