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Simon Willison

Just tried dumping a draft of a blog post I’m working into NotebookLM and having it generate a podcast conversation out of it… and I think this might be a genuinely useful writing review tool

It offers useful alternative lens for checking that the points I’m trying to get across are present and clear-enough that a weird AI thing spots them - plus it helps extract the core themes so I can make sure I’ve covered what I wanted to cover

Previous NotebookLM notes here: simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/29/

4 October at 23:54 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
11 comments
Simon Willison

What’s weird about this is that in the past I’ve tried it with LLM text summaries of my drafts and found very little value in the result - for some reason I find the NotebookLM audio conversation format much more interesting in helping me think critically about what I’ve written

5 October at 0:39 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Simon Willison

Similar to how if I get ChatGPT to write me a rousing speech arguing for the installation of cozy boxes for pelicans at the harbor it feels pretty flat, but the exact same speech delivered by ChatGPT voice mode somehow hits much harder

5 October at 0:42 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Leaping Woman

@simon (looks lovingly into your eyes) Simon, the pelicans do not need cozy boxes.

5 October at 0:50 | Open on spore.social
Harro van der Klauw

@simon how about reading a transcript from the audio speech 🤔

5 October at 6:17 | Open on mastodon.social
Simon Willison

@hvdklauw the transcripts are pretty unpleasant to read in comparison to the audio - here’s a transcript I generated from one using Whisper gist.github.com/simonw/c55b9a7

5 October at 10:05 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Harro van der Klauw

@simon oh yeah alright then, I like, get that speech and reading are two different things, like, weird stop words that in speech are normal, or pauses that don't translate to written text.

5 October at 10:13 | Open on mastodon.social
Martijn Faassen

@simon
Yeah, it makes sense that having it presented differently helps think it through better.

It will make up a point if there isn't one, though. I played with it pointing it to two blog entries of mine and the podcasters struggled hard to connect them even though that connection wasn't really there. And caused them to miss some real points.

5 October at 0:50 | Open on fosstodon.org
Colin Devroe

@simon Can you like, get the model to like, stop using the word like so much? 😊

5 October at 10:03 | Open on mastodon.social
Thomas Vander Wal

@simon I dropped one of my longer blog posts into Notebook LM and had it generate a podcast and the discussion was interesting. The odd thing is it mentioned framings of things that weren't in what I wrote, I had to go back and read my post from 8 to 10 years ago and it wasn't there. Later in the discussion it got the framing right and that nuance was something intended as the usual common framing wasn’t quite correct.

It is helpful if more mainstream audiences are the audience.

5 October at 19:29 | Open on mastodon.social
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