4 ms·

When notebookLM was new, it was interesting to listen to the podcasts. Then the novelty wore off, and I wanted something where I can interact with the podcaster

When notebookLM was new, it was interesting to listen to the podcasts. Then the novelty wore off, and I wanted something where I can interact with the podcasters but it was janky as hell. My current “audio-learning” hack is ChatGPT Live which has become shockingly good after being awful compared to Claude Voice (Let’s not even talk about Gemini voice which is still bad). I go on a walk and dump a paper or article link in the chat, and ask chatGPT Live to walk me through the content in small nuggets, so I can discuss them interactively. For deeper topics I have it quiz me Socratic style so I’m not just passively listening, and actually thinking through problems or ideas.

citiguy 3mo ago
Oh wow, this is a great idea. Can I ask what your prompt looks like?
- d4rkp4ttern 3mo ago
  Me: Ok so I'm going on a walk. I'll dump a link to a Hacker News discussion about an article. You have to read the article and the discussion and walk me thru all the interesting details, nugget by nugget, and move on when I'm ready for the next piece. ChatGPT Live: ok, Great show me the link, I'm waiting. (I paste the link) Me: Ok I pasted it. Now go. ==== For the Socratic quiz I say: I want to understand this more deeply. So instead of you just telling me everything, lay out the problem and a question for me to think about, and I'll try to answer. Even if I answer wrong, you should resist giving me the answer, and instead keep digging with more questions, so that I eventually arrive at the answer myself. I also have a Socratic quiz skill that I wrote for using in Claude Code or Codex to understand implementations/architecture etc: https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detail/workflow/#socratic-quiz https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detai...
  - singhkays 3mo ago
    thanks for sharing! saving this to refer back to this
    - brcmthrowaway 3mo ago
      also saved
  - mandeepj 3mo ago
    To each their own, but for me - that'd be a heavy cognitive load. I ask Claude or ChatGPT to summarize HN comments and the article and provide any takeaways or wisdom nuggets. That's it.
    - john_minsk 3mo ago
      His goal is to learn something. Your goal is to get information. Different scenarios.
    - d4rkp4ttern 3mo ago
      Actually for me it’s more cognitive load when the AI just dumps everything at once, which is why I prefer to have it give me a nugget at a time, so I can take it in, pause and discuss before moving to the next one.
  - blitzar 3mo ago
    > You have to read the article Nahh - pile in based on the title and what you assume the contents might be.
  - _boffin_ 3mo ago
    Did this while on a run for the past few days. The thing / interaction model I’ve been waiting for is here finally.
  - windenntw 3mo ago
    Thats an excellent idea. I've created https://gemini.google.com/gem/17xMogBqRSc2AtdCC-WRfObgHcceD0qxq?usp=sharing https://gemini.google.com/gem/17xMogBqRSc2AtdCC-WRfObgHcceD0... and tested it with a couple conversations and it works great :)
    - d4rkp4ttern 3mo ago
      Nice, it works for discussing concepts baked into the LLM but fails when you want it to read contents of an article or do web search. ChatGPT Live doesn’t have this limitation. Their Voice mode did have this limitation, but the Live mode released a couple weeks ago works exactly as you’d want, with link-following and web search
lardosaurusrex 3mo ago
>hack >podcast slop >letting the llm do it for you there is a very good reason microsoft's ceo got repeatedly dunked on and it was because he literally couldn't stop babbling incoherently about having AI listen to things for him i cannot imagine just sucking the joy out of life like this.
- estearum 3mo ago
  This may come as a surprise, but some people have to ingest large amounts of information for reasons other than producing joy.
  - doctorpangloss 3mo ago
    what do you think will come of the people who have to ingest large amounts of information for reasons other than producing joy, if the AI is ingesting large amounts of information for them? and anyway... the commenter is doing this for joy. so who, really, are you even talking about? why be snarky? i agree, your AI is going to make the tedium in your job easier.
    - estearum 3mo ago
      Probably nothing good, but that's not the complaint being raised! > and anyway... the commenter is doing this for joy. so who, really, are you even talking about? I don't see evidence of that?
- pmarreck 3mo ago
  you must be this guy https://x.com/peregrinepulp/status/2077839461749338560?s=46&t=qWag1P6krA-5zkoLCeptNw https://x.com/peregrinepulp/status/2077839461749338560?s=46&...
- satvikpendem 3mo ago
  They do it for joy when they go on a walk, so perhaps what you find joyful are different than them, not sure why you care.
pmarreck 3mo ago
The limit of these things being at least partially due to the users’ imagination explains at least some of the terrible criticisms I see out there which do not stand up to scrutiny. Perfect example just now in the wild: https://x.com/peregrinepulp/status/2077839461749338560?s=46&t=qWag1P6krA-5zkoLCeptNw https://x.com/peregrinepulp/status/2077839461749338560?s=46&... anyway, your idea is sweet, likely because you are smart
siquick 3mo ago
There is actually an interrupt mode in NotebookLM now. Overall I've found it the best AI product Google have. Only complaint I have about it is the hyper positive US corporate accents get pretty annoying pretty quickly. The realtime voice in ChatGPT is excellent, the newer model is a big step up too.
- fumeux_fume 3mo ago
  I wonder how much of the annoying aspects of the podcasters can be controlled by the custom user instructions. I hate sitting through the patter of how "we're not political, just reporting the views of the sources."
  - idbnstra 3mo ago
    "We have some REALLY interesting sources that we're discussing today"
- toddmorey 3mo ago
  Yeah I think the podcasts were just a clever hack until AI is fast enough to support realtime. It’s practically there now, so a fake podcast is a funny relic and hard to sit through.
- d4rkp4ttern 3mo ago
  Too much friction in notebookLM - several minutes to make a podcast, and they disappear after a while, and the interrupt feature is super-janky.
  - AbstractH24 3mo ago
    > Too much friction in notebookLM This was my main problem with it. Loved it otherwise, but the lack of an API or other automation so I could dump stuff in it and have a podcast ready to download and listen to on my subway ride made me turn away.
- theshrike79 3mo ago
  The new ChatGPT voice has a MASSIVE vocal fry, like to ridiculous levels. It did tone it down when I asked though, but a crazy default.
21asdffdsa12 3mo ago
Moving mind in a moving body. Maybe the future of coding really is a philosophical debate with a dhjinn.. i like this a lot. bravo. I actually can see this as advertisement USP. Some lone hiker going up a mountain through nature to a peak, while the city in the valley below far away becomes functional again because of what is said in that debate about .. walking for ideas - hunted down savanna mode similar to Darwin and all the other old thinkers.
- 21asdffdsa12 3mo ago
  lets expand on this idea.. augment reality overlay showing the resulting code in what you are looking at.. persistence is the ground.. model + business logic is the surroundings.. API is in the clouds..
  - 21asdffdsa12 3mo ago
    Actually would pair better with functional programming.. as in the flow of the data - all those filter and mappers.. would fit well into the way you walk upon. But what is the center of your viewpoint and the center of attention, while you are moving. You would need to have a modal mode.. one where you move through the code structure by walking and/or looking and one - where the center is stationary, even while you move.
hacker-matrix 3mo ago
[flagged]
msh 3mo ago
notebook LM is still much much better at not hallucinating compared to claude and chatgpt.
- d4rkp4ttern 3mo ago
  Yes Claude voice refuses to actually read the article and relies on snippets it finds in web searches and often pretends to have read the article, and when pushed admits it really didn’t. ChatGPT Voice used to have this issue as well, but the new Live mode (released just a few weeks ago) fixed all that, and it actually pauses and reads the article and does real web searches during the conversation.
ctkhn 3mo ago
I never got into the podcasts side but it was good for synthesizing multiple documents in a way chatgpt or google's ai overview couldn't, but now I will just dump a couple PDFs into a new chat in Ollama and then ask it questions about the content. Is there another killer app for notebookLM out there?
toddmorey 3mo ago
I can’t believe how bad Claude’s voice mode is. So much latency and it often tells me “this is rather technical” and would be better talking it out over text. OpenAI has much less latency, can adapt to speak about any topic (though will tell you it put a code sample to look at later), and it just feels like brainstorming with a colleague. If you haven’t tried the live voice version of ChatGPT recently, you should. I love to brainstorm ideas while on walks and it’s fabulous for that. Ask it to summarize the conversation into a doc that will be waiting for you when you are back at your desk.
- scarab92 3mo ago
  Is there a way to make the ChatGPT live experience less dumbed down? It just wants to stay at a superficial level, while annoyingly mimicking human traits like “hmmms” and “umms” I’ve found the better approach is to dictate into the text version and have it read the response. The responses are way better, so long as they don’t contain a table.
_doctor_love 3mo ago
I like the podcast features still for getting an overview or orientation on a new topic where I know I need a big context dump before I can begin to do anything under my own speed. I have tried the "walk and talk" pattern with AI, and it's okay, but I find that it can be kind of janky if the network connection isn't very good. And I find it very frustrating to use still in terms of how the interrupt feature works. For example, if I'm out hiking and there's even a little bit of wind, the voice mode of ChatGPT and Gemini both will think that I'm done talking and begin responding. In fairness to the AI vendors, I imagine that this is a very difficult thing to get right. Humans have a very natural sense of flow in conversation, and knowing when a speaker is done talking and it's appropriate to begin responding.

citiguy 3mo ago

Oh wow, this is a great idea. Can I ask what your prompt looks like?

d4rkp4ttern 3mo ago
Me: Ok so I'm going on a walk. I'll dump a link to a Hacker News discussion about an article. You have to read the article and the discussion and walk me thru all the interesting details, nugget by nugget, and move on when I'm ready for the next piece. ChatGPT Live: ok, Great show me the link, I'm waiting. (I paste the link) Me: Ok I pasted it. Now go. ==== For the Socratic quiz I say: I want to understand this more deeply. So instead of you just telling me everything, lay out the problem and a question for me to think about, and I'll try to answer. Even if I answer wrong, you should resist giving me the answer, and instead keep digging with more questions, so that I eventually arrive at the answer myself. I also have a Socratic quiz skill that I wrote for using in Claude Code or Codex to understand implementations/architecture etc: https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detail/workflow/#socratic-quiz https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detai...
- singhkays 3mo ago
  thanks for sharing! saving this to refer back to this
  - brcmthrowaway 3mo ago
    also saved
- mandeepj 3mo ago
  To each their own, but for me - that'd be a heavy cognitive load. I ask Claude or ChatGPT to summarize HN comments and the article and provide any takeaways or wisdom nuggets. That's it.
  - john_minsk 3mo ago
    His goal is to learn something. Your goal is to get information. Different scenarios.
  - d4rkp4ttern 3mo ago
    Actually for me it’s more cognitive load when the AI just dumps everything at once, which is why I prefer to have it give me a nugget at a time, so I can take it in, pause and discuss before moving to the next one.
- blitzar 3mo ago
  > You have to read the article Nahh - pile in based on the title and what you assume the contents might be.
- _boffin_ 3mo ago
  Did this while on a run for the past few days. The thing / interaction model I’ve been waiting for is here finally.
- windenntw 3mo ago
  Thats an excellent idea. I've created https://gemini.google.com/gem/17xMogBqRSc2AtdCC-WRfObgHcceD0qxq?usp=sharing https://gemini.google.com/gem/17xMogBqRSc2AtdCC-WRfObgHcceD0... and tested it with a couple conversations and it works great :)
  - d4rkp4ttern 3mo ago
    Nice, it works for discussing concepts baked into the LLM but fails when you want it to read contents of an article or do web search. ChatGPT Live doesn’t have this limitation. Their Voice mode did have this limitation, but the Live mode released a couple weeks ago works exactly as you’d want, with link-following and web search

lardosaurusrex 3mo ago

>hack >podcast slop >letting the llm do it for you there is a very good reason microsoft's ceo got repeatedly dunked on and it was because he literally couldn't stop babbling incoherently about having AI listen to things for him i cannot imagine just sucking the joy out of life like this.

estearum 3mo ago
This may come as a surprise, but some people have to ingest large amounts of information for reasons other than producing joy.
- doctorpangloss 3mo ago
  what do you think will come of the people who have to ingest large amounts of information for reasons other than producing joy, if the AI is ingesting large amounts of information for them? and anyway... the commenter is doing this for joy. so who, really, are you even talking about? why be snarky? i agree, your AI is going to make the tedium in your job easier.
  - estearum 3mo ago
    Probably nothing good, but that's not the complaint being raised! > and anyway... the commenter is doing this for joy. so who, really, are you even talking about? I don't see evidence of that?
pmarreck 3mo ago
you must be this guy https://x.com/peregrinepulp/status/2077839461749338560?s=46&t=qWag1P6krA-5zkoLCeptNw https://x.com/peregrinepulp/status/2077839461749338560?s=46&...
satvikpendem 3mo ago
They do it for joy when they go on a walk, so perhaps what you find joyful are different than them, not sure why you care.

pmarreck 3mo ago

The limit of these things being at least partially due to the users’ imagination explains at least some of the terrible criticisms I see out there which do not stand up to scrutiny. Perfect example just now in the wild: https://x.com/peregrinepulp/status/2077839461749338560?s=46&t=qWag1P6krA-5zkoLCeptNw https://x.com/peregrinepulp/status/2077839461749338560?s=46&... anyway, your idea is sweet, likely because you are smart

siquick 3mo ago

There is actually an interrupt mode in NotebookLM now. Overall I've found it the best AI product Google have. Only complaint I have about it is the hyper positive US corporate accents get pretty annoying pretty quickly. The realtime voice in ChatGPT is excellent, the newer model is a big step up too.

fumeux_fume 3mo ago
I wonder how much of the annoying aspects of the podcasters can be controlled by the custom user instructions. I hate sitting through the patter of how "we're not political, just reporting the views of the sources."
- idbnstra 3mo ago
  "We have some REALLY interesting sources that we're discussing today"
toddmorey 3mo ago
Yeah I think the podcasts were just a clever hack until AI is fast enough to support realtime. It’s practically there now, so a fake podcast is a funny relic and hard to sit through.
d4rkp4ttern 3mo ago
Too much friction in notebookLM - several minutes to make a podcast, and they disappear after a while, and the interrupt feature is super-janky.
- AbstractH24 3mo ago
  > Too much friction in notebookLM This was my main problem with it. Loved it otherwise, but the lack of an API or other automation so I could dump stuff in it and have a podcast ready to download and listen to on my subway ride made me turn away.
theshrike79 3mo ago
The new ChatGPT voice has a MASSIVE vocal fry, like to ridiculous levels. It did tone it down when I asked though, but a crazy default.

21asdffdsa12 3mo ago

Moving mind in a moving body. Maybe the future of coding really is a philosophical debate with a dhjinn.. i like this a lot. bravo. I actually can see this as advertisement USP. Some lone hiker going up a mountain through nature to a peak, while the city in the valley below far away becomes functional again because of what is said in that debate about .. walking for ideas - hunted down savanna mode similar to Darwin and all the other old thinkers.

21asdffdsa12 3mo ago
lets expand on this idea.. augment reality overlay showing the resulting code in what you are looking at.. persistence is the ground.. model + business logic is the surroundings.. API is in the clouds..
- 21asdffdsa12 3mo ago
  Actually would pair better with functional programming.. as in the flow of the data - all those filter and mappers.. would fit well into the way you walk upon. But what is the center of your viewpoint and the center of attention, while you are moving. You would need to have a modal mode.. one where you move through the code structure by walking and/or looking and one - where the center is stationary, even while you move.

hacker-matrix 3mo ago

[flagged]

msh 3mo ago

notebook LM is still much much better at not hallucinating compared to claude and chatgpt.

d4rkp4ttern 3mo ago
Yes Claude voice refuses to actually read the article and relies on snippets it finds in web searches and often pretends to have read the article, and when pushed admits it really didn’t. ChatGPT Voice used to have this issue as well, but the new Live mode (released just a few weeks ago) fixed all that, and it actually pauses and reads the article and does real web searches during the conversation.

ctkhn 3mo ago

I never got into the podcasts side but it was good for synthesizing multiple documents in a way chatgpt or google's ai overview couldn't, but now I will just dump a couple PDFs into a new chat in Ollama and then ask it questions about the content. Is there another killer app for notebookLM out there?

toddmorey 3mo ago

I can’t believe how bad Claude’s voice mode is. So much latency and it often tells me “this is rather technical” and would be better talking it out over text. OpenAI has much less latency, can adapt to speak about any topic (though will tell you it put a code sample to look at later), and it just feels like brainstorming with a colleague. If you haven’t tried the live voice version of ChatGPT recently, you should. I love to brainstorm ideas while on walks and it’s fabulous for that. Ask it to summarize the conversation into a doc that will be waiting for you when you are back at your desk.

scarab92 3mo ago
Is there a way to make the ChatGPT live experience less dumbed down? It just wants to stay at a superficial level, while annoyingly mimicking human traits like “hmmms” and “umms” I’ve found the better approach is to dictate into the text version and have it read the response. The responses are way better, so long as they don’t contain a table.

_doctor_love 3mo ago

I like the podcast features still for getting an overview or orientation on a new topic where I know I need a big context dump before I can begin to do anything under my own speed. I have tried the "walk and talk" pattern with AI, and it's okay, but I find that it can be kind of janky if the network connection isn't very good. And I find it very frustrating to use still in terms of how the interrupt feature works. For example, if I'm out hiking and there's even a little bit of wind, the voice mode of ChatGPT and Gemini both will think that I'm done talking and begin responding. In fairness to the AI vendors, I imagine that this is a very difficult thing to get right. Humans have a very natural sense of flow in conversation, and knowing when a speaker is done talking and it's appropriate to begin responding.