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.