from Hacker News

NotebookLM launches feature to customize and guide audio overviews

by alphabetting on 10/17/24, 4:42 PM with 127 comments

  • by wenbin on 10/17/24, 7:09 PM

    NotebookLM is contributing to fake podcasts across the internet, with over 1,300 and counting:

    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

    It won't be long before we see a similar trend with low-quality, AI-generated fake podcasts flooding the internet.

  • by danpalmer on 10/17/24, 10:32 PM

    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.

  • by wg0 on 10/17/24, 10:28 PM

    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.

  • by marviel on 10/18/24, 12:37 AM

    My product 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

  • by cpitman on 10/17/24, 6:19 PM

    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!
  • by OutOfHere on 10/17/24, 7:04 PM

    Google Illuminate recently also introduced a customization feature. I use this customization with it:

    audience=technical, duration=long, tone=professional & engaging

  • by buro9 on 10/18/24, 11:38 AM

    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.

  • by ddtaylor on 10/17/24, 10:00 PM

    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

    I'm still getting the tooling right so that the videos will get made in a better and more consistent schedule.

  • by WesleyLivesay on 10/17/24, 7:25 PM

    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.

  • by quantadev on 10/17/24, 10:26 PM

    Here's an open source version that generates Podcasts:

    https://github.com/souzatharsis/podcastfy

    Developer's twitter: @souzatharsis

  • by xnx on 10/17/24, 6:20 PM

    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...

  • by KaoruAoiShiho on 10/17/24, 6:52 PM

    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.
  • by realty_geek on 10/18/24, 8:02 AM

    I am very very bullish on NotebookLM. There is an awesome notebooklm list here now:

    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.

  • by aldanor on 10/17/24, 7:04 PM

    > With over 80,000 organizations already using NotebookLM

    Really. "Using"? (as in an email from an org owned domain logged in to notebooklm page?..)

  • by thedangler on 10/17/24, 7:55 PM

    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.
  • by kgarten on 10/19/24, 9:42 AM

    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/

    Just posted some ISWC, MobileHCI and UbiComp papers, UIST is up next.

  • by scarface_74 on 10/17/24, 7:50 PM

    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.

  • by whatever1 on 10/17/24, 8:04 PM

    I want the HN comment section as a podcast
  • by deng on 10/18/24, 8:58 AM

    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).
  • by hactually on 10/17/24, 9:57 PM

    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!

  • by gigel82 on 10/17/24, 7:10 PM

    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?
  • by juthen on 10/21/24, 7:00 AM

    The length went from 13mins to 37mins (!) with small prompts.
  • by yieldcrv on 10/17/24, 10:11 PM

    I need different voices, people think the guy is me.
  • by jsemrau on 10/17/24, 7:00 PM

    One day too late. ^-^
  • by tqwhite on 10/17/24, 7:08 PM

    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.
  • by simonw on 10/17/24, 6:25 PM

    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/

    You can listen to the 7m40s resulting MP4 here: 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.