5 ms·

I don’t think this is all that impressive, the generated podcast is pretty shallow - lots of ‘whoa meta’ and the word ‘like’ thrown into every sentence. Yes, i

I don’t think this is all that impressive, the generated podcast is pretty shallow - lots of ‘whoa meta’ and the word ‘like’ thrown into every sentence. Yes, it will generate a middle-of-the-road waffling podcast, but not one with any real depth.

ranger_danger 2y ago
I was blown away by how impressive it was. I honestly thought it was real. I still can't believe these realistic audio capabilities are not being used for pure evil everywhere we look. > like thrown into every sentence I think that's actually part of why it sounds real, because tons of people do actually talk like that. To me what would make it even better is the ability to throw in random jokes and utilize information about their surroundings and recent events. I have been using MeloTTS for text-to-speech and I thought that was about the best we could do right now, but apparently I was very wrong. Is there an offline model one can download today that sounds as good as this NotebookLM?
- JonathanFly 2y ago
  Bark can sound as good, but Google is using SoundStorm which was specifically trained on dialogs. Surprisingly Bark can even sort of match it without being trained to do so, but not reliably. (https://x.com/jonathanfly/status/1675987073893904386 https://x.com/jonathanfly/status/1675987073893904386) And SoundStorm has more than twice the context window of Bark so dialogs are a tight fit.
  - ranger_danger 2y ago
    I just tried the default bark.cpp example from the github readme, and to me it still doesn't sound close enough to realistic, and the audio quality itself was a bit scratchy... maybe I'm doing something wrong. When I tried my own text with it, it went completely off the rails... skipping completely over random words, and also switching to different voices in the middle of a sentence. Trying to run the large model also crashed entirely.
    - JonathanFly 2y ago
      You aren't doing anything wrong - Bark out the box uses a randomly generated voice and I like to think it's modeling the world of random voices which includes bad microphones/audio-quality. (Even bad 'actors' - see how many Bark voices sound like they are reading a script.) Presumably it was trained in noisy data. But it can generate and use a clean voice, they are in there. Most of the Suno default voices are not great either - but a great voice can sound perfectly clear. I haven't done much with Bark lately but on my Twitter there's plenty of clear examples of very realistic voices. Actually here I ran a prompt based on some copy and pasted test 20 times in Bark. I put a couple better results up front, but even in later samples you can find lots of evidence of human-sounding voices. https://sndup.net/bzhz5/ https://sndup.net/bzhz5/ Going off the rails and hallucinating is a hard problem. It can be minimized, but probably would have to solved with simple brute force (check the output with S2T and retry if needed.) For raw audio you can replace the final decoding step with something like VOCOS or MBD if you want to maximize audio quality, though you don't need do with the best voices.
GaggiX 2y ago
It already feels more nuanced than the usual podcast.
CGamesPlay 2y ago
This was exactly my reaction to listening to the example podcast. Although, I wonder if the base material weren't so meta-level product overview, maybe it would be better. I do think the liveliness of the conversation was good (interjections, tonal variety, etc), so at least parts of the demo are impressive.
roywiggins 2y ago
The content is nothing that special these days, you could get it out of Gemini or Claude probably- but the audio affect is awfully convincing. You can compare it to Google's Illuminate which also generates conversations by summarizing texts but in a much straighter, less fluffy way. It's less shallow but in some ways less compelling: https://illuminate.google.com/home https://illuminate.google.com/home
- blurbleblurble 2y ago
  This is awesome, thanks for sharing
infogulch 2y ago
Look I agree with you at a certain level, maybe it can't emulate deep conversations about big topics (maybe it can, I haven't seen an attempt...), but a vast vast majority of podcasts and radio shows are just like this: shallow and incredibly simplified with no more than a nod to the underlying concepts. 70% personality, 20% dumb analogies that the producer thought up in thirty minutes, and <10% actually communicating the material is standard fare for normie podcasts, sadly. Honestly, given the personalization maybe it's a net improvement.
- roywiggins 2y ago
  Summarizing Wikipedia pages has been gotten down to a science, both for podcasts and YouTube explainer videos. This just makes it easier!
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  Agreed... and no offense to OP but I am now questioning just how in touch with modern society they really are. Would they also observe a rocket launch from the grounds of the space center and go "eh, not really impressive" ? Or maybe they are just defining "impressive" as something totally different to what we're thinking.
  - mdp2021 2y ago
    Probably acquainted with «modern society» and a bit edgy in the nerves about it. Probably calling "impressive" something which adds value and does not suggest eerie bits. Sam Altman: «They laughed at us... Well they are not laughing now, are they». No, but a different kind of "serious" was raised.
- djur 2y ago
  Kind of feels like looking at an overflowing landfill and thinking "I wonder if we can invent a robot that just generates new trash directly into the landfill".
  - squigz 2y ago
abraxas 2y ago
At the risk of sounding cliche but this is the worst this tech will ever be. I find it equally scary and fascinating what lies ahead.
shreezus 2y ago
I think it’s “impressive” the first time you use it, but with subsequent runs it’s evident how formulaic it is. The end result, the personalities of the podcast “hosts” and their interactions are similar regardless of the context of inputs. Basically it’s a neat party trick at the moment. I do hope to see it improve however!
shepherdjerred 2y ago
It’s incredible how high our expectations have become which really is a testament to the rapid development of AI.
- NitpickLawyer 2y ago
  Right?! We call this goalpost moving now, but it is not a new phenomena. > It is interesting that nowadays, practically no one feels that sense of awe any longer - even when computers perform operations that are incredibly more sophisticated than those which sent thrills down spines in the early days. The once-exciting phrase "Giant Electronic Brain" remains only as a sort of "camp" cliché, a ridiculous vestige of the era of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. It is a bit sad that we become blasé so quickly. > There is a related "Theorem" about progress in AI: once some mental function is programmed, people soon cease to consider it as an essential ingredient of "real thinking". The ineluctable core of intelligence is always in that next thing which hasn't yet been programmed. This "Theorem" was first proposed to me by Larry Tesler, so I call it Tesler's Theorem: "Al is whatever hasn't been done yet." This quote is from the 80s, from GEB by Douglas Hofstadter. (and btw, I just took a grainy, poorly-lit picture from the book, and could automagically select the text from it, since I couldn't find the quote online. Imagine that tech in the 80s. Hell, it was bad even in the 2000s, with OCR being hit and miss for a long time. Now it "just works".)
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    I think this is just general human behavior. Think about how comfortable your life is, and how the 17th century version of yourself would kill to live it. Then think about how you aren't in a perpetual state of ecstasy for being given this life. People quickly adapt to their current circumstances, take them for granted, and immediately want more.
    - shepherdjerred 2y ago
      You’re taking about advancements made through multiple lifetimes. This burst in AI has lasted about 15 years. TBH I think it’s more of a knee jerk reaction from those tired of hearing about AI or who just want to post contrarian opinions (which I totally do sometimes, too).
Kiro 2y ago
Imagine showing this and your comment to someone 5 years ago.
surfingdino 2y ago
It doesn't matter. It will become a carrier for ads and that's all that matters to those who use NotebookML to generate those podcasts.
- whamlastxmas 2y ago
  Would be easy to take ad filled podcast transcript and re generate it without the ads
vessenes 2y ago
To me, that's just how they tuned the 'audience' of the podcast, which I think we can imagine was at least partly informed by the 'audience' IRL podcasts are named at. I, too would like to be able to 'turn up the technical' on these, but for example, I dumped a paper about a latchless mutexless work distribution algorithm into it, which I had read but still had questions about, and the podcast accurately summarized, simplified it, and got my questions answered, which I then validated later by re-reading the paper. It was faster than combing through the paper would have been.

ranger_danger 2y ago

I was blown away by how impressive it was. I honestly thought it was real. I still can't believe these realistic audio capabilities are not being used for pure evil everywhere we look. > like thrown into every sentence I think that's actually part of why it sounds real, because tons of people do actually talk like that. To me what would make it even better is the ability to throw in random jokes and utilize information about their surroundings and recent events. I have been using MeloTTS for text-to-speech and I thought that was about the best we could do right now, but apparently I was very wrong. Is there an offline model one can download today that sounds as good as this NotebookLM?

JonathanFly 2y ago
Bark can sound as good, but Google is using SoundStorm which was specifically trained on dialogs. Surprisingly Bark can even sort of match it without being trained to do so, but not reliably. (https://x.com/jonathanfly/status/1675987073893904386 https://x.com/jonathanfly/status/1675987073893904386) And SoundStorm has more than twice the context window of Bark so dialogs are a tight fit.
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  I just tried the default bark.cpp example from the github readme, and to me it still doesn't sound close enough to realistic, and the audio quality itself was a bit scratchy... maybe I'm doing something wrong. When I tried my own text with it, it went completely off the rails... skipping completely over random words, and also switching to different voices in the middle of a sentence. Trying to run the large model also crashed entirely.
  - JonathanFly 2y ago
    You aren't doing anything wrong - Bark out the box uses a randomly generated voice and I like to think it's modeling the world of random voices which includes bad microphones/audio-quality. (Even bad 'actors' - see how many Bark voices sound like they are reading a script.) Presumably it was trained in noisy data. But it can generate and use a clean voice, they are in there. Most of the Suno default voices are not great either - but a great voice can sound perfectly clear. I haven't done much with Bark lately but on my Twitter there's plenty of clear examples of very realistic voices. Actually here I ran a prompt based on some copy and pasted test 20 times in Bark. I put a couple better results up front, but even in later samples you can find lots of evidence of human-sounding voices. https://sndup.net/bzhz5/ https://sndup.net/bzhz5/ Going off the rails and hallucinating is a hard problem. It can be minimized, but probably would have to solved with simple brute force (check the output with S2T and retry if needed.) For raw audio you can replace the final decoding step with something like VOCOS or MBD if you want to maximize audio quality, though you don't need do with the best voices.

GaggiX 2y ago

It already feels more nuanced than the usual podcast.

CGamesPlay 2y ago

This was exactly my reaction to listening to the example podcast. Although, I wonder if the base material weren't so meta-level product overview, maybe it would be better. I do think the liveliness of the conversation was good (interjections, tonal variety, etc), so at least parts of the demo are impressive.

roywiggins 2y ago

The content is nothing that special these days, you could get it out of Gemini or Claude probably- but the audio affect is awfully convincing. You can compare it to Google's Illuminate which also generates conversations by summarizing texts but in a much straighter, less fluffy way. It's less shallow but in some ways less compelling: https://illuminate.google.com/home https://illuminate.google.com/home

blurbleblurble 2y ago
This is awesome, thanks for sharing

infogulch 2y ago

Look I agree with you at a certain level, maybe it can't emulate deep conversations about big topics (maybe it can, I haven't seen an attempt...), but a vast vast majority of podcasts and radio shows are just like this: shallow and incredibly simplified with no more than a nod to the underlying concepts. 70% personality, 20% dumb analogies that the producer thought up in thirty minutes, and <10% actually communicating the material is standard fare for normie podcasts, sadly. Honestly, given the personalization maybe it's a net improvement.

roywiggins 2y ago
Summarizing Wikipedia pages has been gotten down to a science, both for podcasts and YouTube explainer videos. This just makes it easier!
ranger_danger 2y ago
Agreed... and no offense to OP but I am now questioning just how in touch with modern society they really are. Would they also observe a rocket launch from the grounds of the space center and go "eh, not really impressive" ? Or maybe they are just defining "impressive" as something totally different to what we're thinking.
- mdp2021 2y ago
  Probably acquainted with «modern society» and a bit edgy in the nerves about it. Probably calling "impressive" something which adds value and does not suggest eerie bits. Sam Altman: «They laughed at us... Well they are not laughing now, are they». No, but a different kind of "serious" was raised.
djur 2y ago
Kind of feels like looking at an overflowing landfill and thinking "I wonder if we can invent a robot that just generates new trash directly into the landfill".
- squigz 2y ago

abraxas 2y ago

At the risk of sounding cliche but this is the worst this tech will ever be. I find it equally scary and fascinating what lies ahead.

shreezus 2y ago

I think it’s “impressive” the first time you use it, but with subsequent runs it’s evident how formulaic it is. The end result, the personalities of the podcast “hosts” and their interactions are similar regardless of the context of inputs. Basically it’s a neat party trick at the moment. I do hope to see it improve however!

shepherdjerred 2y ago

It’s incredible how high our expectations have become which really is a testament to the rapid development of AI.

NitpickLawyer 2y ago
Right?! We call this goalpost moving now, but it is not a new phenomena. > It is interesting that nowadays, practically no one feels that sense of awe any longer - even when computers perform operations that are incredibly more sophisticated than those which sent thrills down spines in the early days. The once-exciting phrase "Giant Electronic Brain" remains only as a sort of "camp" cliché, a ridiculous vestige of the era of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. It is a bit sad that we become blasé so quickly. > There is a related "Theorem" about progress in AI: once some mental function is programmed, people soon cease to consider it as an essential ingredient of "real thinking". The ineluctable core of intelligence is always in that next thing which hasn't yet been programmed. This "Theorem" was first proposed to me by Larry Tesler, so I call it Tesler's Theorem: "Al is whatever hasn't been done yet." This quote is from the 80s, from GEB by Douglas Hofstadter. (and btw, I just took a grainy, poorly-lit picture from the book, and could automagically select the text from it, since I couldn't find the quote online. Imagine that tech in the 80s. Hell, it was bad even in the 2000s, with OCR being hit and miss for a long time. Now it "just works".)
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  I think this is just general human behavior. Think about how comfortable your life is, and how the 17th century version of yourself would kill to live it. Then think about how you aren't in a perpetual state of ecstasy for being given this life. People quickly adapt to their current circumstances, take them for granted, and immediately want more.
  - shepherdjerred 2y ago
    You’re taking about advancements made through multiple lifetimes. This burst in AI has lasted about 15 years. TBH I think it’s more of a knee jerk reaction from those tired of hearing about AI or who just want to post contrarian opinions (which I totally do sometimes, too).

Kiro 2y ago

Imagine showing this and your comment to someone 5 years ago.

surfingdino 2y ago

It doesn't matter. It will become a carrier for ads and that's all that matters to those who use NotebookML to generate those podcasts.

whamlastxmas 2y ago
Would be easy to take ad filled podcast transcript and re generate it without the ads

vessenes 2y ago

To me, that's just how they tuned the 'audience' of the podcast, which I think we can imagine was at least partly informed by the 'audience' IRL podcasts are named at. I, too would like to be able to 'turn up the technical' on these, but for example, I dumped a paper about a latchless mutexless work distribution algorithm into it, which I had read but still had questions about, and the podcast accurately summarized, simplified it, and got my questions answered, which I then validated later by re-reading the paper. It was faster than combing through the paper would have been.