Google's AI Podcast Making Tool is Pretty Cool

NotebookLM is an incredibly useful note-summarizing tool for students and professionals, featuring what I believe to be the best feature yet: an AI podcast maker. Although it's officially called "Audio Overview," this tool is pretty good at providing either a detailed or brief summary, as specified by the user.

But there are certain telltale signs that give out the fact that they are AI generated voices.

I used NotebookLM extensively during my exams recently for the theoretical exams, and I will use it again. The type of technology that is freely available in NotebookLM is usually behind a paywall or some kind of renewable credits system. If I didn't get the results I wanted in the AI Audio Overview, all I had to do was start over with a new prompt specifying exactly what I wanted to hear about.

The user needs to upload all the resources that they want to know more about, like PDFs, .txt files, Markdown files and even audio files. There is a limit of 50 on the number of files (called 'sources') that you can upload in a single notebook. If you ever run out of that limit, just create a new notebook and you're good.

It tends to create mistakes in the audio, like adding wierd human-like 'oh' sounds and 'ah' sounds, that resemble 'oh wow' and 'ahh now I get it' respectively, at random places in the conversation. This is where we tend to notice the artificial parts of artificial intelligence.

There were a lot of times when I wanted an overview on a certain part from one the PDFs that I had uploaded as a source and the conversation included the entire PDFs information with a little breif sentence about the topic I wanted to know more about. The audio overviews somehow cannot isolate a certain information from a single file and take into consideration the entire thing.

NotebookLM's normal chat based information is a lot better at these kind of things and if you need really specific details about something, use this feature. Audio overviews work if you need to get some quick information or a revision on everything that is in the notebook. I am looking forward to seeing how this technology evolves like the rest of generative AI in the near future. Stay tuned, and thank you for reading.