10 ms·

NotebookLM launches feature to customize and guide audio overviews

335 points by alphabetting 2y ago

cpitman 2y ago
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 2y ago
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&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=NotebookLM...
- authorfly 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago
  I really wish it had more voices, notebooklm-guy and notebooklm-girl get tiring
  - kxrm 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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.
- stiltzkin 2y ago
  [dead]
simonw 2y ago
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/ 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/ 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.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - simonw 2y ago
    Aside from being invited to a few events (Google I/O, OpenAI DevDay twice, an upcoming Anthropic hackathon that I applied for and was accepted) I've had no compensation from any of the LLM vendors. I've been invited to a few alpha/beta previews for all three of OpenAI/Google/Anthropic, and I've received API credits as an attendee of the DevDay events. I write about this stuff because it's really interesting to me, and super fun to explore.
  - LegitShady 2y ago
    we really want to know who is behind big pelican
    - simonw 2y ago
      https://simonwillison.net/search/?q=pelican&sort=date https://simonwillison.net/search/?q=pelican&sort=date
mvdtnz 2y ago
[flagged]
KaoruAoiShiho 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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
tqwhite 2y ago
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.
- Jordan-117 2y ago
  The terms explicitly say that uploaded content is not used for training the model.
  - CretinDesAlpes 2y ago
    What they say isn't necessarily what they end up doing, like many corporations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_with_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_with_Google
jsemrau 2y ago
One day too late. ^-^
- YetAnotherNick 2y ago
  What did I miss yesterday?
  - jsemrau 2y ago
    I used it to create an audio version of my "game theory and agent reasoning" series of posts. ... ... tl;dr, not much.
OutOfHere 2y ago
Google Illuminate recently also introduced a customization feature. I use this customization with it: audience=technical, duration=long, tone=professional & engaging
aldanor 2y ago
> With over 80,000 organizations already using NotebookLM Really. "Using"? (as in an email from an org owned domain logged in to notebooklm page?..)
wenbin 2y ago
NotebookLM is contributing to fake podcasts across the internet, with over 1,300 and counting: https://github.com/ListenNotes/ai-generated-fake-podcasts/blob/main/fake_podcasts.csv 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 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 2y ago
  Only 1300? I imagine it would be soo many more.
  - wenbin 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  > 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.
gigel82 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Check out this prompt: https://github.com/souzatharsis/podcastfy/blob/6ad5734c3ffb5d627a00b0b089452c069df81146/data/prompts/prompt_v1.txt https://github.com/souzatharsis/podcastfy/blob/6ad5734c3ffb5...
  - KaoruAoiShiho 2y ago
    Looks good, I wonder if F5 could replace 11labs?
  - gpm 2y ago
    Huh, that gives the LLM an example <Person1> "Welcome to Podcastfy! <break time="0.5s" /> Today, we're summarizing an interesting text about [topic from input text]. Let's dive in!"</Person1> And then tells the LLM not to do anything at all like that example Avoid using statements such as "Today, we're summarizing a fascinating conversation about ...". ] [PauseInsertion: Avoid using breaks (<break> tag) but if included they should not go over 0.1 seconds] Is this an intentional technique in prompt construction to avoid the LLM over indexing on the example or something?
WesleyLivesay 2y ago
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.
- Jordan-117 2y ago
  I think the default prompt attempts something like that -- one host does tend to take a more questioning role, and I've even had a few pods introduce one of them as a guest expert. But it seems like it sometimes loses track of who's who in that dynamic.
scarface_74 2y ago
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 2y ago
[flagged]
thedangler 2y ago
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 2y ago
I want the HN comment section as a podcast
- beng-nl 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  Made one for these comments https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/e3b9d8c5-6243-4ae6-ab1a-6ab2141e196a/audio 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)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- etewiah 2y ago
  Your wish is my command ;) https://news.gipety.com/ https://news.gipety.com/
hactually 2y ago
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 2y ago
  I hope Google never kills it. It is a useful tool. But then whatever Google killed was useful too.
- oceansweep 2y ago
  Hey, I’m working on exactly that: https://github.com/rmusser01/tldw https://github.com/rmusser01/tldw It’s a work in progress, and I literally just added the first foundation for note taking next to the RAG chat last night(not working yet) but it’s getting there. The plan is to build the functionality out and then migrate the codebase to an API backend so that people can make their own front-ends for their own needs. Also, it doesn’t have podcast creation or TTS, yet. They are planned, but it can transcribe and ingest a podcast for RAG chat currently.
ddtaylor 2y ago
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 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 2y ago
I need different voices, people think the guy is me.
quantadev 2y ago
Here's an open source version that generates Podcasts: https://github.com/souzatharsis/podcastfy https://github.com/souzatharsis/podcastfy Developer's twitter: @souzatharsis
wg0 2y ago
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.
- hackernewds 2y ago
  Moreso they're good at attracting talent. Note the attention is all you need paper came out in 2017 - was so hamstrung under Google, that Noam left Google to start Character AI. There he was reportedly close to a foundational model that would've crushed benchmarks. Until Google literally bought him back for $2.7B [1] [1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/noam-shazeer-google-ai-deal-d3605697 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/noam-shazeer-google-ai-deal-d360...
danpalmer 2y ago
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.
marviel 2y ago
My product https://reasonote.com https://reasonote.com allows you to generate podcasts as well, and it's had this feature for a few weeks. Improvements over NotebookLM: (1) You can start with just a subject, and you don't need a full document to begin (though you can do that too![1]) (2) The podcast generates much faster (3) The podcasts are interactive -- you can ask the hosts to change direction mid podcast, and they will do so. (4) (Coming soon) You'll be able to make a Spotify-style Queue of Podcast topics, which you can add to as you encounter new ideas. The primary tradeoff is that the voices / personalities are somewhat less engaging than NotebookLM at this time, though this will be dramatically improved over the coming months. This is all in addition to the core value proposition, which is roughly "AI Generated Duolingo for Any Subject". It's early days, but I'd love for you all to check it out and give me feedback :) [1] Documents are currently heavily length-limited but this will be improved shortly
- MagicMoonlight 2y ago
  Have you tried doing what they do, where you generate the script, then run it through again and ask it to add the pauses and personality to the script?
  - marviel 2y ago
    That's coming soon, yes! I'm learning about how to emotionally prompt the different voice APIs right now. Eleven labs has some interesting writing on the subject in their prompting guide. I'm also playing with other voice models -- built an awesome "voice actor simulator" with OpenAI Realtime Voice -- but it's expensive. Considering asking users to pass in an OpenAI API key for advanced voice? Or maybe just passing the per-token cost along to the user in their subscription.
- tomjen3 2y ago
  Sounds awesome. However I couldn't find any pricing on the website.
  - marviel 2y ago
realty_geek 2y ago
I am very very bullish on NotebookLM. There is an awesome notebooklm list here now: https://github.com/etewiah/awesome-notebooklm https://github.com/etewiah/awesome-notebooklm Will be interesting to see what new ideas NotebookLM leads to. I feel this is how custom GPTs should have been launched. OpenAI is on the backfoot here.
deng 2y ago
I sometimes feel like I'm crazy when I read the comments here. I absolutely cannot listen to these things. They sound like mixture of satire and late-night TV home shopping to me, all this campy hyperbole, the hyping up of even the most mundane things... Also, content-wise, stuff is dumbed down to the point where I can maybe see some value in this as entertainment, but this is not a learning tool, just like you won't become an astrophysicist by watching PBS space time (don't get me wrong, I love space time, but purely as entertainment).
buro9 2y ago
AI tooling has now made it too easy to find things. On a web forum I am admin on, a user opened a DM a week ago titled "Google Notebook LM", someone else had shared a generated podcast thing that summarised the view of the forum on a particular subject, and it called out the usernames of someone who had strong opinions. In response, another user ran with this and asked for a podcast to be generated summarising everything that was said by the user, their political views and all their hot takes. Erm... uh-oh. The use of real identity, the use of the same username across multiple sites, now makes it trivial for things like "take this Github username, find what sites the same username exists on, make a narrative of everything they've ever said, find the best and worst of what they've ever said"... which is terrifying. I've said to the user the same old line we always repeat, "anything placed on the internet is effectively public forever", but only now are the consequences of this really being seen. The forums I run allow username changes, encourage anonymity as much as possible, but we're at a point where multiple online identities, one for every site, interest, employer, etc... is probably the best way to go. I notice on HN that there are many accounts that seem to register just to comment on particular stories and nothing more, and the comments are constructive and well thought out, and now I wonder whether some are just ahead of the curve on this — obscuring the totality of their identity from future employers, or anyone else who might use their words against them. It feels like our lightweight choices in the past will start to have significant consequences in the present or future, and it's only a failure of imagination that is delaying a change in user behaviour.
- causal 2y ago
  And that's just what amateurs can do. Yeah the light cone of online activity seems to only grow with little diminishing, which seems unnatural and counter to the type of environment we evolved for. GDPR and the right to be forgotten seemed funny in my youth, now I see it as wisdom ahead of its time.
- cloverich 2y ago
  The ability to do that exists, and was always going to eventually be easier. We used to all use pseudonyms but that fell out of fashion somewhat; and even then over time its inevitable you'll say one or a few things that can deanonymyze you. This was always going to happen and we can only hope it will change the public perception about privacy, which to this point has often been indifference or even annoyance when one brings it up. > I notice on HN that there are many accounts that seem to register just to comment on particular stories and nothing more, and the comments are constructive and well thought out, and now I wonder whether some are just ahead of the curve on this — obscuring the totality of their identity from future employers, or anyone else who might use their words against them. Throw aways are very common here for that purpose! On my end I'm becoming more interested in how to safeguard users -- anonymize them -- and also how to make easy to _generate_ throwaways without opening the door to spam (e.g. generate from a valid account, but then detach it). HN likely gets around this by being niche; I think the somewhat unattractive site design helps there.
kgarten 2y ago
NotebookLM is great to get an overview of a publication. I created a short podcast focusing on HCI publications using NotebookLM https://www.deep-hci.org/ https://www.deep-hci.org/ Just posted some ISWC, MobileHCI and UbiComp papers, UIST is up next.
juthen 2y ago
The length went from 13mins to 37mins (!) with small prompts.

335 points by alphabetting 2y ago

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 2y ago

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&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=NotebookLM...

authorfly 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
I really wish it had more voices, notebooklm-guy and notebooklm-girl get tiring
- kxrm 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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.
stiltzkin 2y ago
[dead]

simonw 2y ago

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/ 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/ 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.

mistrial9 2y ago
[flagged]
- simonw 2y ago
  Aside from being invited to a few events (Google I/O, OpenAI DevDay twice, an upcoming Anthropic hackathon that I applied for and was accepted) I've had no compensation from any of the LLM vendors. I've been invited to a few alpha/beta previews for all three of OpenAI/Google/Anthropic, and I've received API credits as an attendee of the DevDay events. I write about this stuff because it's really interesting to me, and super fun to explore.
- LegitShady 2y ago
  we really want to know who is behind big pelican
  - simonw 2y ago
    https://simonwillison.net/search/?q=pelican&sort=date https://simonwillison.net/search/?q=pelican&sort=date

mvdtnz 2y ago

[flagged]

KaoruAoiShiho 2y ago

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 2y ago
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

tqwhite 2y ago

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.

Jordan-117 2y ago
The terms explicitly say that uploaded content is not used for training the model.
- CretinDesAlpes 2y ago
  What they say isn't necessarily what they end up doing, like many corporations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_with_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_with_Google

jsemrau 2y ago

One day too late. ^-^

YetAnotherNick 2y ago
What did I miss yesterday?
- jsemrau 2y ago
  I used it to create an audio version of my "game theory and agent reasoning" series of posts. ... ... tl;dr, not much.

OutOfHere 2y ago

Google Illuminate recently also introduced a customization feature. I use this customization with it: audience=technical, duration=long, tone=professional & engaging

aldanor 2y ago

> With over 80,000 organizations already using NotebookLM Really. "Using"? (as in an email from an org owned domain logged in to notebooklm page?..)

wenbin 2y ago

NotebookLM is contributing to fake podcasts across the internet, with over 1,300 and counting: https://github.com/ListenNotes/ai-generated-fake-podcasts/blob/main/fake_podcasts.csv 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 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 2y ago
Only 1300? I imagine it would be soo many more.
- wenbin 2y ago
  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 2y ago
> 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.

gigel82 2y ago

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 2y ago
Check out this prompt: https://github.com/souzatharsis/podcastfy/blob/6ad5734c3ffb5d627a00b0b089452c069df81146/data/prompts/prompt_v1.txt https://github.com/souzatharsis/podcastfy/blob/6ad5734c3ffb5...
- KaoruAoiShiho 2y ago
  Looks good, I wonder if F5 could replace 11labs?
- gpm 2y ago
  Huh, that gives the LLM an example <Person1> "Welcome to Podcastfy! <break time="0.5s" /> Today, we're summarizing an interesting text about [topic from input text]. Let's dive in!"</Person1> And then tells the LLM not to do anything at all like that example Avoid using statements such as "Today, we're summarizing a fascinating conversation about ...". ] [PauseInsertion: Avoid using breaks (<break> tag) but if included they should not go over 0.1 seconds] Is this an intentional technique in prompt construction to avoid the LLM over indexing on the example or something?

WesleyLivesay 2y ago

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.

Jordan-117 2y ago
I think the default prompt attempts something like that -- one host does tend to take a more questioning role, and I've even had a few pods introduce one of them as a guest expert. But it seems like it sometimes loses track of who's who in that dynamic.

scarface_74 2y ago

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 2y ago

[flagged]

thedangler 2y ago

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 2y ago

I want the HN comment section as a podcast

beng-nl 2y ago
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 2y ago
Made one for these comments https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/e3b9d8c5-6243-4ae6-ab1a-6ab2141e196a/audio 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)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
etewiah 2y ago
Your wish is my command ;) https://news.gipety.com/ https://news.gipety.com/

hactually 2y ago

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 2y ago
I hope Google never kills it. It is a useful tool. But then whatever Google killed was useful too.
oceansweep 2y ago
Hey, I’m working on exactly that: https://github.com/rmusser01/tldw https://github.com/rmusser01/tldw It’s a work in progress, and I literally just added the first foundation for note taking next to the RAG chat last night(not working yet) but it’s getting there. The plan is to build the functionality out and then migrate the codebase to an API backend so that people can make their own front-ends for their own needs. Also, it doesn’t have podcast creation or TTS, yet. They are planned, but it can transcribe and ingest a podcast for RAG chat currently.

ddtaylor 2y ago

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 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 2y ago

I need different voices, people think the guy is me.

quantadev 2y ago

Here's an open source version that generates Podcasts: https://github.com/souzatharsis/podcastfy https://github.com/souzatharsis/podcastfy Developer's twitter: @souzatharsis

wg0 2y ago

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.

hackernewds 2y ago
Moreso they're good at attracting talent. Note the attention is all you need paper came out in 2017 - was so hamstrung under Google, that Noam left Google to start Character AI. There he was reportedly close to a foundational model that would've crushed benchmarks. Until Google literally bought him back for $2.7B [1] [1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/noam-shazeer-google-ai-deal-d3605697 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/noam-shazeer-google-ai-deal-d360...

danpalmer 2y ago

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.

marviel 2y ago

My product https://reasonote.com https://reasonote.com allows you to generate podcasts as well, and it's had this feature for a few weeks. Improvements over NotebookLM: (1) You can start with just a subject, and you don't need a full document to begin (though you can do that too![1]) (2) The podcast generates much faster (3) The podcasts are interactive -- you can ask the hosts to change direction mid podcast, and they will do so. (4) (Coming soon) You'll be able to make a Spotify-style Queue of Podcast topics, which you can add to as you encounter new ideas. The primary tradeoff is that the voices / personalities are somewhat less engaging than NotebookLM at this time, though this will be dramatically improved over the coming months. This is all in addition to the core value proposition, which is roughly "AI Generated Duolingo for Any Subject". It's early days, but I'd love for you all to check it out and give me feedback :) [1] Documents are currently heavily length-limited but this will be improved shortly

MagicMoonlight 2y ago
Have you tried doing what they do, where you generate the script, then run it through again and ask it to add the pauses and personality to the script?
- marviel 2y ago
  That's coming soon, yes! I'm learning about how to emotionally prompt the different voice APIs right now. Eleven labs has some interesting writing on the subject in their prompting guide. I'm also playing with other voice models -- built an awesome "voice actor simulator" with OpenAI Realtime Voice -- but it's expensive. Considering asking users to pass in an OpenAI API key for advanced voice? Or maybe just passing the per-token cost along to the user in their subscription.
tomjen3 2y ago
Sounds awesome. However I couldn't find any pricing on the website.
- marviel 2y ago

realty_geek 2y ago

I am very very bullish on NotebookLM. There is an awesome notebooklm list here now: https://github.com/etewiah/awesome-notebooklm https://github.com/etewiah/awesome-notebooklm Will be interesting to see what new ideas NotebookLM leads to. I feel this is how custom GPTs should have been launched. OpenAI is on the backfoot here.

deng 2y ago

I sometimes feel like I'm crazy when I read the comments here. I absolutely cannot listen to these things. They sound like mixture of satire and late-night TV home shopping to me, all this campy hyperbole, the hyping up of even the most mundane things... Also, content-wise, stuff is dumbed down to the point where I can maybe see some value in this as entertainment, but this is not a learning tool, just like you won't become an astrophysicist by watching PBS space time (don't get me wrong, I love space time, but purely as entertainment).

buro9 2y ago

AI tooling has now made it too easy to find things. On a web forum I am admin on, a user opened a DM a week ago titled "Google Notebook LM", someone else had shared a generated podcast thing that summarised the view of the forum on a particular subject, and it called out the usernames of someone who had strong opinions. In response, another user ran with this and asked for a podcast to be generated summarising everything that was said by the user, their political views and all their hot takes. Erm... uh-oh. The use of real identity, the use of the same username across multiple sites, now makes it trivial for things like "take this Github username, find what sites the same username exists on, make a narrative of everything they've ever said, find the best and worst of what they've ever said"... which is terrifying. I've said to the user the same old line we always repeat, "anything placed on the internet is effectively public forever", but only now are the consequences of this really being seen. The forums I run allow username changes, encourage anonymity as much as possible, but we're at a point where multiple online identities, one for every site, interest, employer, etc... is probably the best way to go. I notice on HN that there are many accounts that seem to register just to comment on particular stories and nothing more, and the comments are constructive and well thought out, and now I wonder whether some are just ahead of the curve on this — obscuring the totality of their identity from future employers, or anyone else who might use their words against them. It feels like our lightweight choices in the past will start to have significant consequences in the present or future, and it's only a failure of imagination that is delaying a change in user behaviour.

causal 2y ago
And that's just what amateurs can do. Yeah the light cone of online activity seems to only grow with little diminishing, which seems unnatural and counter to the type of environment we evolved for. GDPR and the right to be forgotten seemed funny in my youth, now I see it as wisdom ahead of its time.
cloverich 2y ago
The ability to do that exists, and was always going to eventually be easier. We used to all use pseudonyms but that fell out of fashion somewhat; and even then over time its inevitable you'll say one or a few things that can deanonymyze you. This was always going to happen and we can only hope it will change the public perception about privacy, which to this point has often been indifference or even annoyance when one brings it up. > I notice on HN that there are many accounts that seem to register just to comment on particular stories and nothing more, and the comments are constructive and well thought out, and now I wonder whether some are just ahead of the curve on this — obscuring the totality of their identity from future employers, or anyone else who might use their words against them. Throw aways are very common here for that purpose! On my end I'm becoming more interested in how to safeguard users -- anonymize them -- and also how to make easy to _generate_ throwaways without opening the door to spam (e.g. generate from a valid account, but then detach it). HN likely gets around this by being niche; I think the somewhat unattractive site design helps there.

kgarten 2y ago

NotebookLM is great to get an overview of a publication. I created a short podcast focusing on HCI publications using NotebookLM https://www.deep-hci.org/ https://www.deep-hci.org/ Just posted some ISWC, MobileHCI and UbiComp papers, UIST is up next.

juthen 2y ago

The length went from 13mins to 37mins (!) with small prompts.