15 ms·
Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio
- albert_e 2y agothe player always starts at 30:00 for me and plays a 4 to 7 minute cllip that seems complete but very brief
- fny 2y agoVery clever use case. I'm presuming the set up here is as follows: - LLM-driven back and forth with the paper as context - Text-to-speech Pricing for high quality text to speech with Google's studio voices run at USD 160.00/1M count. And given the average 10 minute recording at the average 130 WPM is 1,300 words and at 5 characters per word is 6500, we can estimate an audio cost of $1. LLM cost is probably about the same given the research paper processing and conversation. So only costs about $2-3 per 10 minute recording. Wild.
- paxys 2y agoRetail pricing != Google's actual cost.
- jhickok 2y agoI would actually be surprised if companies are focusing on profit at this stage.
- wg0 2y agoThere's no guarantee that the discussion would be accurate. This stems from how the LLMs work.
- falcor84 2y agoThere has never been and never will be a discussion that is fully accurate; this stems from how discussions work.
- wg0 2y agoNot true. If the accuracy of human debate had this much room of error all the time when two subject matter experts are talking, we would not have the progress of civilisation that we have now. Room for error for sure is but at the very frontier of the knowledge where really no one knows what is what. There, yes people can be and have been blatantly wrong.
- falcor84 2y agoFirst off, why have you moved the goal-posts, expecting LLMs to be not just at human level, but at subject matter expert level? And second, I would appreciate recommendations of good debates where both sides have a lot to offer and don't fall into errors; we do need more of those.
- wg0 2y agoBecause that's basic assumption. I'd want a discussion about academic papers from subject matter experts otherwise reading it aloud alone is not of any value let alone commentary on it with no understanding of it whatsoever.
- falcor84 2y agoThere's a spectrum of value here. I don't think we're at the SME level yet, but I'd say we are at least at the level of presentation you'd get at an undergrad seminar module - and I already see significant value here.
- wg0 2y agoTrue. It is not totally useless. There's a lot of utility.
- freefaler 2y agoGreat idea. I wonder how long until we'd see a lot of "autogenerated" podcasts with syndicated advertising inside spamming the podcast space. Like with robovoiced videos on YT reading some scraped content.
- cut3 2y agoAmazon has a project for this already, apparently they are using voice actors to train it.
- TranquilMarmot 2y agoWould you listen to an auto-generated podcast? Seems like removing the humans from the equation kind of defeats the purpose.
- oidar 2y agoThe voice models for this are very good. I'd love to have granular control over the output of a model like this locally.
- willwade 2y agoLike SSML? See azure tts or google cloud tts, or ibm Watson or even old school system tts like SAPI voices on windows. But I hear you. In a VITS typical model system ssml isn’t standard. Piper tts does have it on the roadmap.
- oidar 2y agoI just want programmable prosody. Prosodic controls would allow much more believable TTS - apple used to have it on the earlier TTS models, but these new TTS models sound so natural at the phoneme level, but the prosody is often jacked up so that it's easily identifiable as artificial.
- smusamashah 2y agoIs that audio all generated? All the pauses, breaths, speed ups and everything?
- TranquilMarmot 2y agoFrom the "Help" modal: "Illuminate is an experimental technology that uses AI to adapt content to your learning preferences. Illuminate generates audio with two AI-generated voices in conversation, discussing the key points of select papers. Illuminate is currently optimized for published computer science academic papers. As an experimental product, the generated audio with two AI-generated voices in conversation may not always perfectly capture the nuances of the original research papers. Please be aware that there may be occasional errors or inconsistencies and that we are continually iterating to improve the user experience."
- smusamashah 2y agoWow. I did not pick anything in the voice as a clue that it's generated. So does it make it current best text to audio system?
- Legend2440 2y agoI don’t know if Google’s specifically is the best, but these new GenAI-based text-to-speech systems blow away everything else.
- TranquilMarmot 2y agoReally? Maybe I was just listening too hard to it and could hear it pretty well in some of the weird cadence and pacing. If it was shorter audio and I wasn't prepared for it to be AI, it would definitely be harder to notice.
- achow 2y agoGCP's text to speech options, equally amazing https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/voice-types#chat_experiences https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/voice-types#cha...
- colesantiago 2y agoSo podcasts are now automated, anything with a speaker or a screen is now assumed to be not human. Is this supposed to be a good thing that we want to accelerate (e/acc) towards?
- consf 2y ago[dead]
- Jeff_Brown 2y agoIf can tell where content came from, it's fine with me. If a host of paid spammers or bots can astroturf an opinion and fool me into thinking they are a wide demographic, that's a problem. And it is -- but it predates LLMs.
- thisoneworks 2y agoI honestly don't think this is all that big. What we are seeing has been possible for more than 6 months now(?) with gpt4 and elevenlabs, its just put together in a nice little demo website and with what seems like a multi-modal model(?) trained on nytimes the daily episodes lol. And no i don't think this will gain all that much traction. We will keep valuing authentic human interaction more and more.
- throwthrowuknow 2y agoMan, it’s going to blow your mind when you realize that all the talking heads aren’t real and never were.
- drivers99 2y agolike Max Headroom
- bluelightning2k 2y agoThis is really cool. Although I wouldn't put money on a Google project sticking around even if it was a full fledged product! More of a tech demo than anything else. What's wild about this is that the voices seem way better than GCP's TTS that I've seen. Any way to get those voices as an API?
- bluelightning2k 2y agoSelf-answer but leaving in case anyone else has the same question... seems there are some new options in GCP TTS. Both "studio" and "jorney" are new since I last checked (and I check pretty often).
- dlisboa 2y agoOne problem I see with this is legitimizing LLM-extracted content as canon. The realistic human speech masks the fact that the LLM might be hallucinating or highlighting the wrong parts of a book/paper as important.
- gs17 2y agoWe'll have to see how it holds up for general books. The books they highlighted are all very old and very famous, so the training set of whatever LLM they use definitely has a huge amount of human-written content about them, and the papers are all relatively short.
- shmatt 2y agoThe top list of Apple Podcasts is full of real humans intentionally lying or manipulating information, it makes me worry much less about computer generated lies
- dlisboa 2y agoEven if society is kinda collapsing that way people are still less likely to listen to a random influencer's review of biochemistry than a Professor in Biochemistry. These LLMs know just as much about the topic they're summarizing as a toddler, they should be treated with just as much skepticism. There are hacks everywhere but humans lying sometimes have implications (libel/slander) that we can control. Computers are thought of in general society as devoid of bias and "smart" so if they lie people are more likely to listen.
- vanishingbee 2y agoHappens in the very first example: [Attention is All You Need - 1:07] > Voice A: How did the "Attention is All You Need" paper address this sequential processing bottleneck of RNNs? > Voice B: So, instead of going step-by-step like RNNs, they introduced a model called the Transformer - hence the title. What title? The paper is entitled "Attention is All You Need". People are fooling themselves. These are stochastic parrots cosplaying as academics.
- consf 2y ago[dead]
- alganet 2y agoCool tech. Now we know that very soon no one will be able to trust podcasts or video narration.
- Legend2440 2y agoYou shouldn’t have been trusting podcasts in the first place, Joe Rogan says plenty of false things no AI required.
- lelandfe 2y agoSure, but now now I – an idiot – can publish a podcast on... "Bayesian Multilevel Models," and fool almost everyone into thinking I know anything about it. I've seen YouTubers provide tutorials on auto-creating YouTube videos and podcast episodes on niche scientific subjects, on how to build seemingly-reputable brands with zero ongoing effort. That is all totally novel. Being able to lie or be wrong before is orthogonal to the real issue: scale.
- alganet 2y agoScale has already been achieved with money (advertisement revenue) and influence (politics agendas, fame) on a viral platform. What this tech brings is speed. If Google did it, someone else will also do it.
- throwthrowuknow 2y agoAll the more reason to empower people to review, rate, comment on, block, downvote, and otherwise signal when something is incorrect.
- alganet 2y agoYou realize it's a feedback loop, don't you? If the people interacting are not reliable, then it means the system is not reliable. Karma points, youtube views, thumbs ups, likes... none of those things have any significant value as an indicator of correctedness.
- dgellow 2y agoReally impressive. The podcasting spam we will get from this will be a pain, but really impressive demo
- jhickok 2y agoI honestly think it could be the opposite, and we will have entire high-quality works of fiction at our fingertips.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nxobject 2y agoA related experiment from Google: NotebookLM (notebooklm.google.com), which takes a group of documents and provides a RAG Gemini chatbot in return. I wish Google would make these experiments more well-known!
- timmg 2y agoYou also might find a similar feature arriving in that product.. soon.
- yangcheng 2y agoThanks for sharing! would be super nice if notebooklm can automatically include reference papers from a single paper.
- sagarpatil 2y agoWith Google's 1 million token and Sonnet 3.5's 200,000 token limit, is there any advantage of using this over just uploading the pdf files and ask questions about it. I was under the impression that you will get more accurate results by adding the data in chat.
- lasermike026 2y agoThis is awesome.
- ansk 2y agoImagine reading a math or programming textbook where each statement was true with probability 0.95.
- sno129 2y agoPlenty of mistakes in textbooks and research articles, it's possible the probability is already even lower.
- slashdave 2y agoThat just means you are adding errors on top of existing ones, hardly an improvement
- throwthrowuknow 2y agoerrata. Also real humans often make mistakes in live interviews. The biggest difference is that eventually these fake humans will have lower error rates than real ones.
- contagiousflow 2y ago> eventually these fake humans will have lower error rates than real ones Source?
- danesparza 2y agoI wonder how soon until this waitlisted service eventually gets thrown on the trash heap that Google Reader is on. Building trust with your users is important, Google.
- syntaxing 2y agoI’ve been using the ElevenLabs Reader app to read some articles during my drive and it’s been amazing. It’s great to be able to listen to Money Stuff whenever I want to. The audio quality is about 90% there. Occasionally, the tone of the sentence is wrong (like surprised when it should be sad) and the wrong enunciation (bow, like bowing down or tying a bow) but still very listenable.
- tkgally 2y agoI like that app, too. The reading is very natural overall, though sometimes the emphasis is a bit off. What catches my ear is when Word A in a sentence receives stronger stress than Word B, but the longer context suggests that actually it should be Word B with the greater emphasis. An inexperienced human reader might miss that as well, but a professional narrator who is thinking about the overall meaning would get it right. I prefer professional human narration when it is available, but the Reader app’s ability to handle nearly any text is wonderful. AI-read narration can have another advantage: clarity of enunciation. Even the most skillful human narrator sometimes slurs a consonant or two; the ElevenLabs voices render speech sounds distinctly while still sounding natural.
- bogwog 2y agoWhat does this accomplish? Who does this help? How does this make the world a better place? This only seems like it would be useful for spammers trying to game platforms, which is silly because spam is probably the number one thing bringing down the quality of Google's own products and services.
- nonrandomstring 2y agoI think I just discovered a new emotion. Simultaneous feelings of excitement and disappointment. No matter how great the idea, it's hard to stay excited for more than a few microseconds at the sight of the word "Google". I can already hear the gravediggers shovels preparing a plot in the Google graveyard, and hear the sobs of the people who built their lives, workflows, even jobs and businesses around something that will be tossed aside as soon as it stops being someone's pet play-thing at Google. A strange ambivalent feeling of hope already tarnished with tragedy.
- srameshc 2y agoWe are working on something content driven (for an ad or subscription model) with lot of effort and time and I am concerned how this technology will affect all that effort and eventually monetization ideas. But I can see how helpful this tool can be for learning new stuff.
- timonoko 2y agoWorks surprisingly well. I actually bothered to listen "discussions" about these boring-looking papers. English is particularly bad to read aloud because it is like programming language Fortran based on immutable tokens. If you want tonal variety, you have to understand the content. Some other languages modify the tokens themselves, so just one word can be pompous, comical, uneducated etc.
- Ninjinka 2y agothe Lexification/Roganization/Dwarkeshing/Hubermanning of reading
- srik 2y agoNothing is real anymore.
- bitshiftfaced 2y agoOccasionally there's a podcast or video I'd like to listen to, but one of the voices is either difficult to understand, or in some way awful to listen to, or maybe the sound quality is really bad. It would be nice to have a an option for an automatically redubbed audio.
- wintermutestwin 2y agoI sure do wish podcasters would learn about compression. I am constantly getting my ears blown out in the car from a podcast with multiple speakers who are at different volumes.
- swyx 2y agopodcaster here. what does compression have to do with it? youre just talking about different levels from diff mics
- semi-extrinsic 2y agoProbably a lot of the problem GP is describing comes from people having inconsistent distance to their microphone, moving around a lot. Then using an audio compressor effect plugin is an appropriate answer. I've often thought about adding a compressor pedal to my TV sound system. It would be excellent for when you're watching action movies with hard to hear dialogue mixed with loud noises, and the kids are asleep, so you spend the evening turning volume up and down eight times per minute.
- swyx 2y agoif it works so well why not always keep it on? :)
- drivers99 2y agoSetting the levels equally to start would help, but doesn't control when someone suddenly gets loud. With compression, you can increase quiet sounds, decrease loud sounds, or both. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression A type of compressor used to limit the maximum signal is a limiter. "Limiters are common as a safety device in live sound and broadcast applications to prevent sudden volume peaks from occurring." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limiter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limiter
- fabmilo 2y agoso much pleasantry so much fluff. reduce the noise. get to the point.
- ants_everywhere 2y agoThis is a good idea and well executed. I think the hard part now is pointing it in an appropriate direction. If it's just used for generating low quality robo content like we see on TikTok and YouTube then it's not so interesting.
- RobMurray 2y agoI couldn't listen for more than a couple of minutes. It's the usual repetitive, over wordy llm generated drivel.
- franze 2y agoOh, another Google Waitlist...
- SeanAnderson 2y agoI'm fairly excited for this use case. I recently made the switch from Audible to Libby for my audiobook needs. Overall, it's been good/fine, but I get disappointed when the library only has text copies of a book I want to listen to. Often times they aren't especially popular books so it seems unlikely they'll get a voiceover anytime soon. Using AI to narrate these books will solve a real problem I experience currently :)
- banach 2y agoI can see this working reasonably for text that you can understand without referring to figures, and for texts for which there is external content available that such a conversation could be based on. For a new, say, math paper, without prose interspersed, I’d be surprised if the generated conversation will be worth much. On the other hand, that is a corner case and, personally, I suspect I will be using this for the many texts where all I need is a presentation of the material that is easy to listen to.
- aanet 2y agoWhat a fantastic idea! Great way to learn about those pesky research papers I keep downloading (but never get to reading them). I tried a few, e.g. Attention is All You Need, etc. The summary was fantastic, and the discussion was, well, informative. Does anyone know how the summary was generated? (text summarization, I suppose?) Is there a bias towards "podcast-style discussion"? Not that I'm complaining about it - just that I found it helpful.
- oulipo 2y agoWhy not, if you could also interject with questions, remarks, or "cut the chase" like remarks. Also it's weird that they focus only on AI papers in the demo, and not more interesting social stuff, like environment protection, climate change, etc
- leobg 2y agoI made something like this for my kids: 1. Take a science book. I used one Einstein loved as a kid, in German. But I can also use Asimov in English. Or anything else. We’ll handle language and outdated information on the LLM level. 2. Extract the core ideas and narrative with an LLM and rewrite it into a conversation, say, between a curious 7 year old girl and her dad. We can take into account what my kids are interested in, what they already know, facts from their own life, comparisons with their surroundings etc. to make it more engaging. 3. Turn it into audio using Text-to-Speech (multiple voices).
- flakiness 2y agoHow do you get the source data (text) from a book? To me it is the major roadblock for LLM-based commercial content consumption.
- leobg 2y agoOld books are on Gutenberg, archive.org etc. Physical ones, I scan. Cutting the spine is easiest. But today you can also just take pics with your phone. Many retailers also sell EPUB. Which is just HTML. Obviously, that’s all for private consumption only. (Unless you’re OpenAI I guess. :-P)
- flakiness 2y agoOh you gotta serious! Salute to you from a lazy dad.
- GeoAtreides 2y agoWhy wouldn't you just let the kid read (not listen) the book on their own and then have a conversation with them about it?
- leobg 2y agoBecause it may be in another language or aimed at another audience beyond my kid’s reading level.
- antirez 2y agoRelated: [rumors] Audible is starting a pilot project to do just that with the ebooks.
- OutOfHere 2y agoCan it make something bigger than 5 minutes?
- Tepix 2y agoThe audio for "AI for Low-Code for AI" is almost 8 minutes long.
- Analemma_ 2y agoBooks I can understand, but I'm genuinely curious: would anyone here find it useful to hear scientific papers as narrated audio? Maybe it depends on the field, but when I read e.g. an ML paper, I almost always have to go through it line-by-line with a pen and scratchpad, jumping back and forth and taking notes, to be sure I've actually "got it". Sometimes I might read a paragraph a dozen times. I can't see myself getting any value out of this, but I'm interested if others would find it useful.
- creativenolo 2y agoI’m not sure “hear scientific papers as narrated audio” best describes what this is. From the link: > Illuminate generates audio with two AI-generated voices in conversation, discussing the key points of select papers.
- motoxpro 2y agoThis is insane! To be able to listen to a conversation to learn about any topic is amazing. Maybe it's just me because I listen to so many podcasts but this is Planet Money or The Indicator from NPR about anything. Definitely one of the coolest things I have seen an LLM do.
- vincentpants 2y agoListening to an AI generated discussion-based podcast on the topic of anticipating the scraping of deceased people's digital footprint to create an AI copy of your loved one makes the cells that make up my body want to give up on fighting entropy.
- gherkinnn 2y agoI often thought Black Mirror was a bit too much. And before you know it, there is a story of David Cameron diddling a pig's head in his youth and now our deceased are being brought back to life. Charlie Brooker was ahead of us all.
- alenwithoutproc 2y agoit would be really cool if we’d have a clubhouse-style gen-ai feed for hn or reddit comments to listen to. to me
- belval 2y agoI guess I am in my grouchy old person phase but all I could think of what the Gilfoyle quote from Silicon Valley when presented with a talking refrigerator. > "Bad enough it has to talk, does it need fake vocal tics...?" - Gilfoyle Found it: https://youtu.be/APlmfdbjmUY?si=b4-rgkxeXigU_un_&t=179 https://youtu.be/APlmfdbjmUY?si=b4-rgkxeXigU_un_&t=179
- drivers99 2y agoI would want to select a voice without vocal fry, which one of the voices in these demos has.
- layman51 2y agoDid anyone else notice that according to the generation info, each recording was created on 12/31/69 at 4:00 PM?
- e12e 2y agoInteresting - listening to the first example (Attention is all you need)[1] - I wonder what illuminate would make of Fielding's REST thesis? [1] https://illuminate.google.com/home?pli=1&play=SKUdNc_PPLL8 https://illuminate.google.com/home?pli=1&play=SKUdNc_PPLL8
- CatWChainsaw 2y agoSo it will immediately be trashed by GenAI bullshit and killedbygoogle within three years, right?
- elashri 2y agoOne useful use case would be helping making academic papers more accessible. It would be useful also for people to listen to arxiv papers that seems interesting. It would be useful tool in academic world. Also useful for students who would have more accessible form of learning. I have a project idea already to use arxiv RSS API to fetch interesting papers based on keywords (or some LLM summary) and then pass it to something like illuminate and then you have a listening queue to follow latest in the field. Though there will be some problems with formatting but then you could just open the pdf to see the plots and equations.
- yismail 2y agoI got in the beta a couple weeks ago and tried it out on some papers [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41020635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41020635
- ElijahLynn 2y agoI've been meaning be the all you need is attention paper for yours and never have. And I finally listened to that little generated interview as their first example. I think this is going to be very very useful to me!
- yunohn 2y agoI listened to multiple demos, the pauses and vocal intonations sound so fake. They’re inserted at odd times that a real human speaker would not.
- israrkhan 2y agoGreat... a new era of autogenerated podcasts is here.
- throwaway81523 2y agoHow about making the program work in the other direction. It could take one of those 30 minute youtube tutorial videos that is full of fluff and music, and turn it into an instructables-like text article with a few still pictures.
- C-Loftus 2y agoSynthesized voices are legitimately a great way to read more and give your eyes a break. I personally prefer just converting a page or book to an audiobook myself locally. The new piper TTS models are easy to run locally and work very well. I made a simple CLI application and some other folks here liked it so figured I post it. https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook
- frays 2y agoThanks for sharing, I tried to build and set this up on my Macbook (ARM/M1) but seems that Piper currently doesn't support MacOS yet. This is a very useful tool, I will Star it and wait until Piper supports MacOS in the future.
- dv35z 2y agoI got Piper TTS running in a Docker container (I found that the issue is related to Python version and "phenomenize" library). If you're curious / interested in getting this to work, happy to help out & share the code. My contact is in my profile.
- MailleQuiMaille 2y agoHow long until you are part of the conversation...?
- marviel 2y agoI'm bullish on podcasts as a Passive learning counterpart to the Active learning style in traditional educational instruction. Will be releasing a general purpose podcast generator for educational purposes in reasonote.com within the next few days, along with the rest of the core featureset.
- keyle 2y agoI listen to 5 mins of this and all I can feel is sadness and how cringe it is. Please do not replace humanity with a faint imitation of what makes use human, actual spontaneity. If you produce AI content, don't emulate small talk and quirky side jabs. It's pathetic. This is just more hot garbage on top of a pile of junk. I imagine a brighter future where we can choose to turn that off and remove it from search, like the low quality content it is. I would rather read imperfect content from human beings, coming from the source, than perfectly redigested AI clown vomit. Note: I use AI tools every day. I have nothing against AI generated content, I have everything against AI advancements in human replacement, the "pretend" part. Classifying and returning knowledge is great. But I really dislike the trend of making AI more "human like", to the point of deceiving, such as pretending small talk and perfect human voice synthesis.
- lannisterstark 2y ago>don't emulate small talk and quirky side jabs. It's pathetic. >all I can feel is sadness and how cringe it is. Hm, really? I came to the opposite conclusion. I explained this to a friend who can see very little, and usually relies on audio to experience a lot of the world and written content - it is especially hard because a lot of written content isn't available in audio form or isn't talked about it. He was pretty excited about it, and so am I. Maybe it's not the use case for you, and that's fine, but going "this is pathetic, no one is using it, le cringe" is a bit far.
- keyle 2y agoI didn't write "no one is using it" and what is "le cringe"?
- givemeethekeys 2y agoI think they've set it up to sound like NPR meets patronizing customer support agent. They could easily set it up to sound exactly the way you / any listener would like to hear their podcasts. But yeah - like electronic instruments, AI will take away the blue collar creative jobs, leaving behind a lot more noise and an even greater economic imbalance.
- 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- greesil 2y agoCan't wait to hear some hallucinated alternative facts in a hot new podcast.
- GaggiX 2y agoDid they removed the book section? I can only find the "papers" section now.
- theage 2y agoThe choice of intonement even mimics creatives which I'm sure they'll love. The vocal fry, talking through a forced smile, bumbling host is so typical. Only, no one minds demanding better from a robot so it's even more excruciating fluff with no possible parasocial angle. Limiting choice to frivolous voices is really testing the waters for how people will respond to fully acted voice gen from them, they want that trust from the creative guild first. But for users who run into this rigid stuff it's going to be like fake generated grandma pics in your google recipe modals.
- maxglute 2y agoAI voices sound particularly good at higher playback rates, with silence removal. Which is granted is an acquired taste, but common feature for podcast players so there's audience for it. Fast talkers feel more competent and one kind of stops interrogating on quality of speech.
- Animats 2y agoWhy did they have to call an audio system "Illuminate"?
- cma 2y agoIt's not in the decorating a page in gold leaf or lighting up something senses of the word.
- surfingdino 2y agoAmazing. I see great future ahead. We are already able to turn audiobooks into eBooks and Illuminate finally completes the circle of content regurgitation.
- jamalaramala 2y agoBy now, we can find thousands of hours of discussions online about popular papers such as "Attention is All You Need". It should be possible to generate something similar without using the paper as a source -- and I suspect that's what the AI does. In other words: I suspect that the output is heavily derivative from online discussions, and not based on the papers. Of course, the real proof would be to see the output for entirely new papers.
- GaggiX 2y agoThere are much newer papers shown than "Attention is All You Need" (all of them?) and much less talked about (probably all of them, too). It shouldn't be surprising that a LLM is able to understand a paper, just upload one to Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
- jamalaramala 2y agoOf course, "Attention is All You Need" was one of the most discussed papers in our field; there are entire podcast episodes dedicated to it, so it should be easy for a LLM to create a new one. For all the other papers, assuming they were impactful, they must have been referred by others, highlighting what their contribution is, what is controversial, etc. In other words: the LLM doesn't have to "understand" the paper; it can simply parrot what others have been saying/writing about it. (For example: a podcast about Google Illuminate could use our brief exchange to discuss the possible merits of this technology.)
- lasermike026 2y agoWhile this is very nice what I need is my computer to take voice commands, read content in various formats and structure, and take dictation for all of my apps. I need this in my phone too. I can do this now but I have to use a bunch of different tools that don't work seamless together. I need the Voice and Conversational User Interface that is built into the operating system.
- lordswork 2y agoThat sounds like a great broader vision, but let's also celebrate the significant step in that direction that this work presents. This appears to be very useful as is.
- banku 2y agoI like how it generates a conversation, rather than just "reading out" or simplifying the content. You can extend this idea to enhance the dynamics of agent interactions
- awongh 2y agoI think the obvious next feature for this specific thing is to be able to click to begin asking questions in the context of the audio you just listened to. You can basically become one of the hosts- “You mentioned before about RNNs, tell me more about that”
- falcor84 2y agoThis is really cool, and it got me thinking - is there any missing piece to creating a full AI lecturer based on this? What I'm thinking of is that I'd input a pdf, and the AI will do a bit of preprocessing leading to the creation of learning outcomes, talking points, visual aids and comprehension questions for me; and then once it's ready, will begin to lecture to me about the topic, allowing me to interrupt it at any point with my questions, after which it'll resume the lecture while adapting to any new context from my interruptions. Are we there yet?
- marviel 2y agoI'm building this at https://reasonote.com/app/login https://reasonote.com/app/login Sign up and I'll let you in very soon.
- MaxSebasti 2y agohttps://www.rebind.ai/ https://www.rebind.ai/
- ancorevard 2y agoAre there any services like this that exist with an API? I would like to send a text and then get back a podcast dialog between two people.
- SpencerBratman 2y agofounder of podera.ai here, we're building this right now (turn anything into a podcast) with custom voices, customization, and more. would love some hn feedback!
- tambourine_man 2y agoThis is as impressive as it is scary and creepy. It also tells us something about humans, because it really does feel more engaging having two voices discussing a subject than simple text-to-speech, even though the information density is smaller.
- disqard 2y agoOral communication is one of the oldest and most powerful inter-human channels (possibly only facial expressions are more primal and powerful) [0] LLMs have "hacked" this channel, and can participate in a 1:1 conversation with a human (via text chat). With good text <--> speech, machines can participate in a 1:1 oral conversation with a human. I'm with you: this is hella scary and creepy. [0] Walter J Ong: "Orality and Literacy".
- hiby007 2y agoWhy I feel this will end up on https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- dpflan 2y agoWhy is this appealing? Why would one prefer this AI conversation to the actual source? Can these be agents and allow the listener to ask questions / interact?
- lying4fun 2y agomany times I’ve wanted to listen to a summarisation of a chapter from a textbook I’m reading. this can be useful in at least 3 ways: 1) it prepares me for the real studying. by being exposed to the gist of the material before actual studying, im very confident that the subsequent real study session would be more effective 2) i can brush up easily on key concepts, if im unable to sit properly, eg while commuting. but even if i were, a math textbook can be too dense for this purpose, and i often just want to refresh my memory on key concepts. and often im tired of _reading_ symbols or words, that’s when id prefer to actually _listen_, in a way, using a muscle that’s not tired 3) if im struggling with something, i can play this 5min chapter explanation multiple times a day throughout the week, while doing stuff, and engaging with it in a casual way. i think this would “soften” the struggle tremendously, and increase the chances of grasping the thing next time i tackle it also id like a “temperature” knob, that i could tweak for how much in detail i want it to go
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 0xedd 2y ago[dead]
- yencabulator 2y agoMaybe I'm the odd one out but "That's interesting. Can you elaborate more?", "Good question", "That sounds like a clever way" etc were annoying filler.
- WalterBright 2y agoDidn't Amazon get in trouble for Kindles that read books out loud?
- simon_kun 2y agoGoogle launched similar functionality in NotebookLM today. You can generate podcasts from a wide range of sources: https://blog.google/technology/ai/notebooklm-audio-overviews/ https://blog.google/technology/ai/notebooklm-audio-overviews... Looks like you can generate from Website URLs if you add them as sources to your notebook, as well as Slides, Docs, PDFs etc. Anything NotebookLM supports.
- bahmboo 2y agoInteresting. Right now Google Illuminate only allows you to generate from PDFs that are on Arvix.org
- richardreeze 2y agoThis is something I don't get about Google. I saw they launched NotebookLM Audio Overview today: https://blog.google/technology/ai/notebooklm-audio-overviews/ https://blog.google/technology/ai/notebooklm-audio-overviews... So what the heck is illuminate and why would they simultaneously launch a competing product?