If you’re looking to impress friends and family, perhaps you should send them a link to a podcast all about you. But what if no one has recorded such a podcast? No problem. Thanks to NotebookLM, an AI tool from Google, you can have a pair of professionally sounding podcast hosts extol your virtues for several minutes.
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The AI generated hosts don’t have names, but they’re a male and female team who sound great and did an amazing job describing my attributes in ways that almost made me blush. In my case, I pasted in the web address of my online bio, but you can also load in PDFs, YouTube videos, audio files, Google Docs or Google Slides.
If you load a web address, the two fake hosts not only talk about what they learned from your bio, but they also check out the entire website. I learned this by giving it links to two almost identical bios. The one hosted on Larrysworld.com, my personal site, included references to many of my newspaper articles. The one at ConnectSafely.org focused mainly on my and the organization’s online safety work.
The fake hosts brought some humor into the conversation, kind of making fun of some of the things the AI learned about me from my website. They also went into some tangents that made them sound like live podcast hosts.
Comparison
To get a sense on how it might describe someone in a very different type of job, I downloaded a sample resume of an electrician. The two fake hosts said that they were basing their podcast on his resume. They provided a positive spin on his qualifications while talking a bit about their own struggles with electric problems.
Like my bio, this podcast was based on the material loaded, which, in both cases, was published by the person being described. These fake hosts apparently didn’t do lateral research to find out if the information was true.
Once you generate the podcast, you can download it as an MP3 file and share it with others. If you do, eventually tell the listeners that it’s generated by AI. Aside from ethics and honesty, the same two fake hosts are used for every podcast. They sound real, but eventually listeners will figure out that they’re not.
You can try NotebookLM for free at notebooklm.google.
Practical uses
Besides being a parlor trick, there are some practical uses for this tool. I …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
