AI generated podcasts from NotebookLM

I recently played around a bit with Google’s new AI-powered NotebookLM site.

When you upload the documents that are central to your projects, NotebookLM instantly becomes an expert in the information that matters most to you.

Its most interesting feature is its ability to create a 10-minute audio conversation about the material you uploaded, sort of like a podcast episode. It nicely extracts key points from your sources, but pads it with natural but annoyingly banal commentary, like SNL’s NPR parodies.

Still, as podcast lovers know, that kind of natural conversation style can be a very effective way to learn.

So here’s the AI’s audio “deep dive” into the Wikipedia article on Frances Hodgson Burnett:

(The AI apparently thought the asterisks in the text were part of the titles.)

And then here’s the AI’s conversation about an older blog post of mine, My approach to music composition:

Wow, AI bots talking about me, and pretending to be impressed! Amazing! Ha!

I may use the site for something serious in the future, but at the moment, it’s a lot of fun to experiment with.


ETA: Here’s its conversation based on a single sentence: “I don’t know why, but everything seems great!” It manages to blather for 5 minutes about this sentence. Highly amusing.

Trovedex remade

A couple weeks ago I remade my web app Trovedex from scratch. It’s private for now, only for my own use; if you go there, it’ll ask you for a password. You’ll have to settle with this impressive screenshot:

It’s now a simple document manager. You can create documents (HTML pages) and put them in folders. That’s basically it. I wanted something like a wiki, but I wanted to use HTML instead of markdown, and I wanted to see folders and files on the side for easy navigation between pages.

I created the app with the help of AI, which was a fun experience (Claude to be exact). While AI doesn’t do all the work for you, it definitely makes things a lot easier. For instance, I had trouble figuring out React before (a javascript library for building interfaces), so the AI was able to show me how it’s done. Adding some features was also breeze. I could tell the AI: “Let’s add the ability to delete documents.” And it would respond: “Sure, paste this code to your frontend and this code to your backend.” Done! Of course, that’s an easy feature to add. Some features caused a bit more trouble. Trovedex is using the Jodit Editor to edit the HTML on the documents / pages, which Claude had some trouble with now and then, forcing me to do my own debugging.

Claude also had a habit of choosing annoying tools and frameworks. It recommended I use PostgreSQL for the backend database, and Prisma to connect to it. No! I had to tell it to use MongoDB and Axios instead, which seem a lot simpler to me.

Overall though, using the AI made me much more productive.

There are still plenty of features I’d like to add to Trovedex eventually, including the ability to make pages or folders public. That way I can use it to replace “Hanniwiki”, which was a MediaWiki site containing the catalog of all my music and stuff. But the software (which was more sophisticated than I really needed) went out of date, so “Hanniwiki” has been missing for a while now.

I’ll probably open-source the project to GitHub at some point.