Google’s AI-powered notebook has a new feature. You can give it some reference material and it will create a two-hosted podcast audio talking about it.
It is surprisingly good and surprisingly bad. I fed a copy of “Last Men Standing” into it. The result is in this YouTube:
It gets a surprising amount of good context from very little input. However, there are a few things it got wrong.
- It says the story is from “I. E. Spectra” which might be IEEE Spectrum. However, the story appeared in Nature.
- It also talks about the people on the reservation calling themselves “The Last Men Standing.” While that’s the title, no one ever says that in the story.
- It talks about different people in the story having different reasons for not wanting to teleport. That is also made up.
In addition to getting things wrong, it also was very annoying where one host would talk and the other host would constantly interject place holders. “Yeah!” or “OK” or “Right.” for example. Some of that would be good. It did a LOT of it.
This was after I gave it a prompt to ask it NOT to do that and also not to have the hosts finish each other’s sentences. It also seemed to repeat itself at some point.
Granted, it is a little hard to do this for fiction, I think, and a short piece at that. I’ve given it longer factual articles and it has done a little better. But the interjection is maddening and it usually if not always gets something a little wrong.
Still, it’s pretty promising. Just not quite there yet.
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