[HN Gopher] NotebookLM launches feature to customize and guide a...
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NotebookLM launches feature to customize and guide audio overviews
Author : alphabetting
Score : 164 points
Date : 2024-10-17 16:42 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
| cpitman wrote:
| Nice, I've only scratched the surface of Notebook LM, mainly for
| dumping lots of component reference material (datasheets,
| reference guides, application notes, etc). The text querying
| works great, but the audio overview wasn't very useful when it
| stuck to the high level of the content. With some ability to
| steer the topic out might be quite useful!
| xnx wrote:
| In a sea of similar tools, Google seems to have struck on
| something semi-viral with NotebookLM. Output can be mediocre, but
| with the bar for many podcasts being set at "read pages from
| Wikipedia", that's not bad at all for zero effort.
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=NotebookLM...
| authorfly wrote:
| The 100 baseline on that graph is the highest attention the
| term has received, and it correlated with a launch and has
| since decreased.
|
| Google never has problems with first the first few millions for
| consumer-launched tools. They have problems with the first few
| millions of net profit almost 100% of the time and shut it down
| a few years later.
|
| But I do agree this is a good play for Google, it plays to
| their strengths.
| xnx wrote:
| > The 100 baseline on that graph is the highest attention the
| term has receive
|
| Good point. I couldn't come up with a well-enough known
| competing tool to compare against.
| cchance wrote:
| I really wish it had more voices, notebooklm-guy and
| notebooklm-girl get tiring
| kxrm wrote:
| Definitely hear what you are saying but I personally think it
| is for the best that they are instantly recognizable as
| NotebookLM podcasters. Especially as this makes the rounds on
| the internet. If you could manipulate the voices it would
| just make it more challenging to detect if a "Podcast" is
| using this tool.
| xnx wrote:
| Now that NotebookLM has gone from "small experiment" to
| "moderate viral success", I expect all kinds of roadmaps are
| being drawn up to use it to hook users into the broader
| Google AI ecosystem (e.g. automatically add images and
| illustrations by Imagen 3, etc.
| simonw wrote:
| This works pretty well. I tried it with this guidance prompt:
| You are both pelicans who work as data journalist at a
| pelican news service. Discuss this from the perspective
| of pelican data journalists, being sure to inject
| as many pelican related anecdotes as possible
|
| Against this article:
| https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/17/video-scraping/
|
| You can listen to the 7m40s resulting MP4 here:
| https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/17/notebooklm-pelicans/
|
| Example snippets: You ever find yourself wading
| through mountains of data trying to pluck out the
| juicy bits? It's like hunting for a single shrimp in a
| whole kelp forest, am I right?
|
| And: The future of data journalism is
| looking brighter than a school of silversides reflecting
| the morning sun. Until next time, keep those wings
| spread, those eyes sharp, and those minds open. There's a
| whole ocean of data out there just waiting to be
| explored.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Ahh excellent! Podcast listings and Youtube weren't filling up
| with quite enough AI slop yet.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Not an improvement for me. I've been instructing NotebookLM for
| weeks now already by including the instructions into the sources.
| That way I have version control on my prompts and can easily drag
| into the sources upload. This requires finding my instructions
| and copying and pasting, there's also a 500 character limit which
| is very small, I have over 2000 characters for my standard
| prompts.
| ajcp wrote:
| I think it's an easy affordance for those users who are just
| interested in the basic functionality of the product.
|
| However like you I cottoned on early that one could put a
| "Podcast Production Notes.txt" in each one of my Notebooks that
| allowed me to really put some horsepower behind the generated
| audio :D
| jsemrau wrote:
| One day too late. ^-^
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Google Illuminate recently also introduced a customization
| feature. I use this customization with it:
|
| audience=technical, duration=long, tone=professional & engaging
| aldanor wrote:
| > With over 80,000 organizations already using NotebookLM
|
| Really. "Using"? (as in an email from an org owned domain logged
| in to notebooklm page?..)
| tqwhite wrote:
| I realize now that this is actually a clever way to collect
| training data. If it were any company other than Google, I'd be
| like, Awesome toy. With them, I am uneasy.
| wenbin wrote:
| NotebookLM is contributing to fake podcasts across the internet,
| with over 1,300 and counting:
|
| https://github.com/ListenNotes/ai-generated-fake-podcasts/bl...
|
| Google is taking a different approach this time, moving quickly.
| While NotebookLM is indeed a remarkable tool for personal
| productivity and learning, it also opens the door for spammers to
| mass-produce content that isn't meant for human consumption.
|
| Amidst all the praise for this project, I'd like to offer a
| different perspective. I hope the NotebookLM team sees this and
| recognizes the seriousness of the spam issue, which will only
| grow if left unaddressed. If you know someone on the team, please
| bring this to their attention - Could you please provide a tool
| or some plain-English guidelines to help detect audio generated
| by NotebookLM? Is there a watermark or any other identifiable
| marker that can be used?
|
| Just recently, a Hacker News post highlighted how nearly all
| Google image results for "baby peacock" are AI-generated:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41767648
|
| It won't be long before we see a similar trend with low-quality,
| AI-generated fake podcasts flooding the internet.
| htrp wrote:
| Only 1300? I imagine it would be soo many more.
| wenbin wrote:
| It's definitely more than that.
|
| The 1,300+ shows are just the ones recently removed from
| Listen Notes.
|
| Give it a few days, and I'm sure the number will double,
| quadruple, and continue to grow. :(
| jsheard wrote:
| > it also opens the door for spammers to mass-produce content
| that isn't meant for human consumption.
|
| What's new? Every novel class of genAI product has brought a
| tidal wave of slop, spam and/or scams to the medium it
| generates. If anyone working on a product like this doesn't
| anticipate it being used to mass produce vapid white-noise
| "content" on an industrial scale then they haven't been paying
| attention.
| wenbin wrote:
| This is definitely not a new issue.
|
| What I'm aiming for is to ensure that the NotebookLM team is
| aware of the impact and actively considering it. Hopefully,
| they are already working on tools or mechanisms to address
| the problem--ideally before their colleagues at YouTube and
| Google Search come asking for help to fight NotebookLM-
| generated spams :)
|
| It's certainly easier for the creators of genAI to build
| detection tools than for outsiders to do so. AI audio
| detection is a hard problem -
| https://www.npr.org/2024/04/05/1241446778/deepfake-audio-
| det...
| criddell wrote:
| > What I'm aiming for is to ensure that the NotebookLM team
| is aware of the impact and actively considering it.
|
| What is the impact? Have any of them attracted an audience
| of any meaningful size? If a month from now there are 1.3
| million generated podcasts, what do you anticipate the
| fallout to be?
| zooq_ai wrote:
| Geez, I hope there aren't people like you working at Google
| newfocogi wrote:
| This doesn't strike me as much of a problem as it appears for
| you. What are the biggest issues you foresee?
|
| I'm an avid podcast listener, but I already ignore 99.9% of
| podcasts out there. I'm not concerned that this is going to
| become 99.99%.
|
| If these AI generated podcasts are all bad, I will just
| continue to ignore them. If some turn out to be good, it seems
| like a win to me.
|
| If you're worried about an existential "what happens to the
| world if all media is machine generated", I guess I'm willing
| to hop on the ride and see what we find out.
| ghshephard wrote:
| 99.9? There are roughly 3mm podcasts out there right now - I
| listen, regularly, to about 10 over a year (in any given week
| maybe 3-4). I'm therefore ignoring 2,999,990 or 99.9997% of
| podcast. I definitely agree with you that this isn't a
| problem.
|
| (Also - ironically, _one_ of the podcast out of those 10 that
| I listen to regularly - it 's the Deep Dive on AI. A
| NotebookLM production! )
| frabcus wrote:
| It could poison the well - make it hard for people to find
| new good podcasts, and reduce discovery and revenue. Also
| they could fragment our society even more, disconnect
| people from people. Doesn't seem worth the risk.
|
| If people want to listen to AI generated podcasts, they can
| just make them themselves. They don't need publishing on a
| platform alongside human-made podcasts. If I was Apple, who
| ultimately control curation of podcasts, then I'd prevent
| them. After all, Apple Intelligence will soon do as good a
| job of making your custom podcast if that's what you want.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| So what do you propose Google do to prevent this from
| happening?
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| The comments' default remedy is tribal: "The only moral
| content is my content." We sort of used to live in that world
| under the studio and TV networks system. Most consumers would
| say, it was not so bad, maybe better even.
|
| Of course, the commenter never says this, living in the world
| today, where the writing he likes would never be published by
| the New York Times like it is on Twitter, the TV he likes
| would never be offered for free like it is on YouTube, and
| the music he likes would never been offered for pennies on
| Spotify. Some meaningful creators will lose from every remedy
| you could think of, where Google "something somethings" AI.
| Maybe the root problem is generalizing.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I created a "podcast episode" (???) of my personal blog
| (not trying to get traffic to it. It's more of a journal)
| using NotebookLM. It sounded just as bland and overproduced
| as a "professional" podcast by NPR like "Planet Money" and
| "The Indicator".
|
| Whether that is saying how high quality NotebookLM is or
| how low quality NPRs podcast are is an exercise for the
| reader.
|
| The only reason "Stuff you should know" is better is
| because of the random off topic discussions they go into
| and that's not a complaint about SYSK.
| ghshephard wrote:
| Where do you get the "low-quality" part from - my experience
| with NotebookLM is that they create much higher quality, more
| informative, more fact based, and more concise podcasts than
| 99% of the stuff I listen to. I've mostly switched entirely
| over to NotebookLM for my podcast listening. They, generally,
| offer a far higher quality experience from my perspective.
|
| Maybe you have the problem backwards - we accidentally end up
| listening to _non_ NotebookLM podcasts?
| 3abiton wrote:
| It's interesting assumption that by virtue of being AI
| generated, it's considered bad/fake. 20 years ago, people
| hated how photoshop changed the photo design industry,
| NotebookLM is knocking on the door now.
| ben_w wrote:
| I'm excited by AI, but I've also tried using this specific
| one to generate a podcast based on one of my own blog posts
| and will only try again due to this product announcement
| rather than because I think the state of the art is already
| "there".
|
| On the plus side, the speech is almost perfect; so good,
| that I sincerely hope the voices themselves are never fully
| under user control.
|
| With regards to the actual summary of the content I gave
| them, I would say they are grade B: only mostly correct,
| they're still inventing things I didn't say and missing
| things I did say.
|
| That's not to say humans don't make mistakes, I still
| consider this objectively impressive, that is able to reach
| even this level was SciFi when I was a kid -- but why waste
| time on a grade-B podcast when the AAA-tier costs you as a
| consumer a 30 second advert?
| sgerenser wrote:
| Interesting, are there any podcasts in particular that you
| recommend? Everything I've heard from it just seems like the
| most banal, cookie cutter stereotype of a podcast with
| nothing but extremely surface level summarization of a given
| article, peppered with random cliches and fake sounding
| reactions "Wow! ok, so let's hear more about that. I'm
| intrigued!" "OK, let's dive deep." Etc.
| ghshephard wrote:
| DeepDive AI - I'm addicted to it.
| phainopepla2 wrote:
| That does not appear to be an AI generated podcast.
| sgerenser wrote:
| There's a normal, human generated podcast called Deep
| Dive: AI (https://deepdive.opensource.org/). There's also
| a confusingly similar named podcast Deep Dive AI that
| appears to only have one episode and is NotebookLM
| generated. Which one are you referring to?
| magicalhippo wrote:
| A coworker fed some EU trade regulation page and its official
| FAQ to NotebookLM, and I was quite impressed with the
| results.
|
| It was factually accurate, and presented the topic in a
| manner that was easy to digest and kept it interesting.
|
| I didn't plan to but ended up listening to the whole thing,
| and I normally don't enjoy the podcast format.
|
| For someone new to the topic, it'd be a pretty great intro
| compared to reading the official pages.
| frabcus wrote:
| Personally, I hate even the idea of an AI made podcast,
| because to me podcasts are personal and emotional. They're
| about the individual humans who make them. They're not just a
| source of "information".
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Podcasts - episodic radio shows hosted on Apple Music and
| Spotify - haven't been around for very long. Not long enough to
| have kids being tutored in making podcasts and then becoming
| adults with that sentimental hobby, like with playing violin or
| oil painting. If you believe that the "Human Authenticity
| Badge" is meaningful for podcasts, it's complicated: traditions
| play the biggest role in the outrage you are trying to spin,
| not an appeal to slop and spam, which of course, there is
| already a ton of low quality podcasts, music and art written by
| real people for no nefarious purpose whatsoever. Like with many
| of these posts, which are really common on HN, there isn't a
| sensible remedy suggested besides pointing the fingers at some
| giant corporation, and asking them to do something impossible.
|
| If you care a lot about podcast quality, go and make your own
| podcast service with better discovery. Once you realize the
| antagonist was collaborative filtering, made possible by non-
| negative matrix factorization dating from the year 2000, and
| not AI, you will at least have learned something from the
| comment, instead of just feeling better. And then, how do you
| propose to curate by hand, and why would someone choose your
| curation over the New Yorker's? And maybe those very purists,
| trying to make everything sentimental, accusing everyone of
| slop and spam - well, why do so many creators thrive and ignore
| the New Yorker's opinion about them entirely? Perhaps curation
| is not only not scalable, but also wrong. Difficult questions
| for listeners and podcast authors alike.
| groby_b wrote:
| Counterpoint: Most podcasts were utterly worthless before AI
| too. The world will do fine losing a few mattress ad vehicles.
|
| Like other data, provenance suddenly matters a lot. From my
| POV, that's good. Not all data sources are created equal, and
| this is putting it into stark enough relief it might actually
| change the landscape. (In case it isn't obvious, I strongly
| believe most of the Internet was garbage well before LLMs. We
| just called it "SEO". Still garbage)
| kredd wrote:
| I generally agree, but when AI generated content is actively
| trying to avoid being labelled as "AI generated" it kinda
| gets depressing. Because in the end, it will just make the
| entire industry "seem" worthless, akin to AI generated
| pictures.
|
| I'd rather let the end user know if it was made by humans or
| not, and let the marker decide. If people love listening to
| such content, let it be. But hiding how it was made, feels a
| bit disingenuous.
| tonygiorgio wrote:
| This is like saying: "Text based LLMs should do more to stop
| people from publishing the results of what they produce"
|
| NotebookLM seems wonderful for digesting various content in an
| alternative way. It's not a "fake podcast" either.
|
| Nobody is saying that the audio output should or should not be
| published somewhere. That's a user decision for both publishing
| and subscribing.
|
| Indexes and discovery on the internet is where you advocate
| policing instead of nit picking a useful tool.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Well which one is it? Are the podcasts low quality or not? If
| they are, what the hell are you worried about? To be worried
| about, idk, disinformation from _podcasts_ of all things is
| absolutely silliness. Won 't someone think of the... podcast
| audiences? Fuckin what dude?
| wg0 wrote:
| It sounds more like we should ban email and all email providers
| should consider the problem of email spam which traditional
| mail didn't have because no one could afford that many envelops
| and stamps.
|
| Or like we should go back to carts because cars are noisy and
| not only that but might collide with pedestrians and not only
| that, might even collide among each other.
|
| Instead of containing the tools and curtailing the progress
| (email and cars) we should probably try to contain and curtail
| abusers. Very hard to do, I know but the right thing to do.
| gigel82 wrote:
| Is there an open source tool that copies NotebookLM yet, or did
| anyone dig a bit into how the prompting is done to generate
| output in this dialogue format?
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Check out this prompt:
| https://github.com/souzatharsis/podcastfy/blob/6ad5734c3ffb5...
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Looks good, I wonder if F5 could replace 11labs?
| WesleyLivesay wrote:
| Surprised this was not there from the beginning. It can result in
| much better output. My problem with the default prompt is that it
| often is just two equally "knowledgeable hosts" kind of just
| bouncing information back and forth. With being able to customize
| the prompt you can create a kind of "explainer" and "listener"
| dynamic among the hosts that really helps the overall flow of the
| episode.
|
| Something like this:
|
| The two podcast hosts have very different levels of knowledge on
| the topic. The first host is the expert on the topic and explains
| the subject and the details to the second host. The second host
| has very little existing knowledge about the subject but will
| react to the information and ask follow up questions.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I've recently started using NotebookLM and I wish either it was
| from any other company besides Google or that Google would charge
| for it.
|
| Google has the attention span and product focus of a crack addled
| flea. I'm afraid the entire project will be killed.
|
| NotebookLM is a great product. I just started using it this week
| to ingest artifacts for a new project and get an overview.
| almararajaded wrote:
| 0919553550
| thedangler wrote:
| Really wish there was an API so I can upload my content and
| connect it to my website to make it interactive for my potential
| clients.
| whatever1 wrote:
| I want the HN comment section as a podcast
| beng-nl wrote:
| That could actually be a top quality podcast - well moderated
| content from thoughtful people, many subject matter experts,
| with mostly thoughtful discussion.. (I read hn for the
| comments..) sounds good to me.
| KTibow wrote:
| Made one for these comments
| https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/e3b9d8c5-6243-4ae6-ab...
| (although I haven't checked the quality since I'm in a public
| space as of writing)
| hactually wrote:
| It's a shame that folks look at this and think it's awesome but
| then have the dawning question of "When will Google kill it?"
|
| People building on top of this will likely want to know what the
| Open Source / non doomed version will be!
| wg0 wrote:
| I hope Google never kills it. It is a useful tool. But then
| whatever Google killed was useful too.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| This is awesome! I have actually been using NotebookLM to create
| daily digests of HN and publish them to YouTube:
| https://www.youtube.com/@HackerCasts
|
| I'm still getting the tooling right so that the videos will get
| made in a better and more consistent schedule.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I need different voices, people think the guy is me.
| quantadev wrote:
| Here's an open source version that generates Podcasts:
|
| https://github.com/souzatharsis/podcastfy
|
| Developer's twitter: @souzatharsis
| wg0 wrote:
| I am late to the Google's AI party but... My personal impression
| (might be wrong) is that Google's breadth and depth of AI tools
| is heavily underrated ranging from Notebook LLM to AI studio. Too
| good as far as I have tried.
|
| Google of course is the birthplace of attention is all you need.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I was using this yesterday. I dumped all postmortems for an
| aspect of our infrastructure into a notebook and could then ask
| it to pull out common themes. It was remarkably effective. I also
| generated one of these "audio overviews" (aka podcasts) and it
| was great.
|
| There was a vast improvement in quality from giving it a prompt
| when generating the overview. The generic un-prompted overview
| was for entirely the wrong audience, in our case users of our
| infrastructure rather than the developers. When instructing it to
| generate an overview for the SRE team and what they should focus
| on it was far better.
|
| Was it useful for our in-depth analysis, no. Would I listen to
| one based on the last 100 postmortems for a new team I joined,
| _absolutely_. As an overview it was ideal, pulling out common
| themes from a lot of data and getting some of the vibe right too.
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