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Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

713 points| leblancfg | 1 year ago |illuminate.google.com

243 comments

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freefaler|1 year ago

Great idea. I wonder how long until we'd see a lot of "autogenerated" podcasts with syndicated advertising inside spamming the podcast space.

Like with robovoiced videos on YT reading some scraped content.

hliyan|1 year ago

I'm conflicted about this. On one hand, it makes content more accessible to a larger audience. On the other hand, it leverages copyrighted material without crediting or compensating creators, potentially puts those same creators out of work, and finally, reduces the likelihood of more such (human) creators arising in the future. My worry is that a few generations hence, human beings will forget many skills like this, and if model collapse occurs due to LLMs ingesting their own data over successive iterations, future generations will be in for a difficult time. Reminiscent of Asimov's "The Feeling of Power".

fallinditch|1 year ago

Wondercraft have been offering this service for a while, and produce some of their own auto-generated podcasts including the Hacker News Recap which does an excellent job of summarizing the most engaged posts on HN. https://www.wondercraft.ai/our-podcasts

bemmu|1 year ago

I made one for fun last year. It was quite easy to get two hosts talking to each other in a natural manner. It's just a python script where I tell it which Reddit discussion or other topic to make an episode segment about, and it works fine as long as I cherry-picked out of a few generations.

Here's an example segment, demonstrating an extra feature where they can call an expert to weigh in on whatever they are talking about: https://soundcloud.com/bemmu/19animals

TranquilMarmot|1 year ago

Would you listen to an auto-generated podcast? Seems like removing the humans from the equation kind of defeats the purpose.

evilkorn|1 year ago

I hate the robo voiced videos. I watch a lot of space content and run into them often on the homepage. Usually easy to spot with low views and 1k subs.

netdevnet|1 year ago

Soon. Maybe even fully auto generated content where spammers prompt an LLM and the end product is a bunch of audio files

cut3|1 year ago

Amazon has a project for this already, apparently they are using voice actors to train it.

OutOfHere|1 year ago

It isn't spam. It is the present and the future. Advertising however is the spam.

fny|1 year ago

Very clever use case. I'm presuming the set up here is as follows:

- LLM-driven back and forth with the paper as context

- Text-to-speech

Pricing for high quality text to speech with Google's studio voices run at USD 160.00/1M count. And given the average 10 minute recording at the average 130 WPM is 1,300 words and at 5 characters per word is 6500, we can estimate an audio cost of $1. LLM cost is probably about the same given the research paper processing and conversation.

So only costs about $2-3 per 10 minute recording. Wild.

paxys|1 year ago

Retail pricing != Google's actual cost.

wg0|1 year ago

There's no guarantee that the discussion would be accurate. This stems from how the LLMs work.

dlisboa|1 year ago

One problem I see with this is legitimizing LLM-extracted content as canon. The realistic human speech masks the fact that the LLM might be hallucinating or highlighting the wrong parts of a book/paper as important.

vanishingbee|1 year ago

Happens in the very first example:

[Attention is All You Need - 1:07]

> Voice A: How did the "Attention is All You Need" paper address this sequential processing bottleneck of RNNs?

> Voice B: So, instead of going step-by-step like RNNs, they introduced a model called the Transformer - hence the title.

What title? The paper is entitled "Attention is All You Need".

People are fooling themselves. These are stochastic parrots cosplaying as academics.

shmatt|1 year ago

The top list of Apple Podcasts is full of real humans intentionally lying or manipulating information, it makes me worry much less about computer generated lies

gs17|1 year ago

We'll have to see how it holds up for general books. The books they highlighted are all very old and very famous, so the training set of whatever LLM they use definitely has a huge amount of human-written content about them, and the papers are all relatively short.

ec109685|1 year ago

There are only so many hours in the day, so giving people the choice to consume content in this form doesn’t seem all that bad.

It would be good to lead off with a disclaimer.

nine_k|1 year ago

Frankly, humans also sometimes remember things incorrectly or pay excess attention to the less significant topics while discussing a book.

In this regard, LLMs are imperfect like ourselves, just to a different extent.

jamalaramala|1 year ago

We can find thousands of hours of discussions about popular papers such as "Attention is All You Need". It should be possible to generate something similar without using the paper as a source -- and I suspect that's what the AI is doing here.

In other words: it's not summarising the paper in a clever way, it is summarising all the discussions that have been made about it.

falcor84|1 year ago

This is really cool, and it got me thinking - is there any missing piece to creating a full AI lecturer based on this?

What I'm thinking of is that I'd input a pdf, and the AI will do a bit of preprocessing leading to the creation of learning outcomes, talking points, visual aids and comprehension questions for me; and then once it's ready, will begin to lecture to me about the topic, allowing me to interrupt it at any point with my questions, after which it'll resume the lecture while adapting to any new context from my interruptions.

Are we there yet?

vincentpants|1 year ago

Listening to an AI generated discussion-based podcast on the topic of anticipating the scraping of deceased people's digital footprint to create an AI copy of your loved one makes the cells that make up my body want to give up on fighting entropy.

gherkinnn|1 year ago

I often thought Black Mirror was a bit too much.

And before you know it, there is a story of David Cameron diddling a pig's head in his youth and now our deceased are being brought back to life.

Charlie Brooker was ahead of us all.

nxobject|1 year ago

A related experiment from Google: NotebookLM (notebooklm.google.com), which takes a group of documents and provides a RAG Gemini chatbot in return.

I wish Google would make these experiments more well-known!

sagarpatil|1 year ago

With Google's 1 million token and Sonnet 3.5's 200,000 token limit, is there any advantage of using this over just uploading the pdf files and ask questions about it. I was under the impression that you will get more accurate results by adding the data in chat.

yangcheng|1 year ago

Thanks for sharing! would be super nice if notebooklm can automatically include reference papers from a single paper.

timmg|1 year ago

You also might find a similar feature arriving in that product.. soon.

syntaxing|1 year ago

I’ve been using the ElevenLabs Reader app to read some articles during my drive and it’s been amazing. It’s great to be able to listen to Money Stuff whenever I want to. The audio quality is about 90% there. Occasionally, the tone of the sentence is wrong (like surprised when it should be sad) and the wrong enunciation (bow, like bowing down or tying a bow) but still very listenable.

tkgally|1 year ago

I like that app, too.

The reading is very natural overall, though sometimes the emphasis is a bit off. What catches my ear is when Word A in a sentence receives stronger stress than Word B, but the longer context suggests that actually it should be Word B with the greater emphasis. An inexperienced human reader might miss that as well, but a professional narrator who is thinking about the overall meaning would get it right.

I prefer professional human narration when it is available, but the Reader app’s ability to handle nearly any text is wonderful. AI-read narration can have another advantage: clarity of enunciation. Even the most skillful human narrator sometimes slurs a consonant or two; the ElevenLabs voices render speech sounds distinctly while still sounding natural.

leobg|1 year ago

I made something like this for my kids:

1. Take a science book. I used one Einstein loved as a kid, in German. But I can also use Asimov in English. Or anything else. We’ll handle language and outdated information on the LLM level.

2. Extract the core ideas and narrative with an LLM and rewrite it into a conversation, say, between a curious 7 year old girl and her dad. We can take into account what my kids are interested in, what they already know, facts from their own life, comparisons with their surroundings etc. to make it more engaging.

3. Turn it into audio using Text-to-Speech (multiple voices).

GeoAtreides|1 year ago

Why wouldn't you just let the kid read (not listen) the book on their own and then have a conversation with them about it?

flakiness|1 year ago

How do you get the source data (text) from a book? To me it is the major roadblock for LLM-based commercial content consumption.

lasermike026|1 year ago

While this is very nice what I need is my computer to take voice commands, read content in various formats and structure, and take dictation for all of my apps. I need this in my phone too. I can do this now but I have to use a bunch of different tools that don't work seamless together. I need the Voice and Conversational User Interface that is built into the operating system.

lordswork|1 year ago

That sounds like a great broader vision, but let's also celebrate the significant step in that direction that this work presents. This appears to be very useful as is.

banku|1 year ago

I like how it generates a conversation, rather than just "reading out" or simplifying the content. You can extend this idea to enhance the dynamics of agent interactions

awongh|1 year ago

I think the obvious next feature for this specific thing is to be able to click to begin asking questions in the context of the audio you just listened to. You can basically become one of the hosts- “You mentioned before about RNNs, tell me more about that”

elashri|1 year ago

One useful use case would be helping making academic papers more accessible. It would be useful also for people to listen to arxiv papers that seems interesting. It would be useful tool in academic world. Also useful for students who would have more accessible form of learning.

I have a project idea already to use arxiv RSS API to fetch interesting papers based on keywords (or some LLM summary) and then pass it to something like illuminate and then you have a listening queue to follow latest in the field. Though there will be some problems with formatting but then you could just open the pdf to see the plots and equations.

banach|1 year ago

I can see this working reasonably for text that you can understand without referring to figures, and for texts for which there is external content available that such a conversation could be based on. For a new, say, math paper, without prose interspersed, I’d be surprised if the generated conversation will be worth much. On the other hand, that is a corner case and, personally, I suspect I will be using this for the many texts where all I need is a presentation of the material that is easy to listen to.

bitshiftfaced|1 year ago

Occasionally there's a podcast or video I'd like to listen to, but one of the voices is either difficult to understand, or in some way awful to listen to, or maybe the sound quality is really bad. It would be nice to have a an option for an automatically redubbed audio.

wintermutestwin|1 year ago

I sure do wish podcasters would learn about compression. I am constantly getting my ears blown out in the car from a podcast with multiple speakers who are at different volumes.

dgellow|1 year ago

Really impressive. The podcasting spam we will get from this will be a pain, but really impressive demo

jhickok|1 year ago

I honestly think it could be the opposite, and we will have entire high-quality works of fiction at our fingertips.

keyle|1 year ago

I listen to 5 mins of this and all I can feel is sadness and how cringe it is.

Please do not replace humanity with a faint imitation of what makes use human, actual spontaneity.

If you produce AI content, don't emulate small talk and quirky side jabs. It's pathetic.

This is just more hot garbage on top of a pile of junk.

I imagine a brighter future where we can choose to turn that off and remove it from search, like the low quality content it is. I would rather read imperfect content from human beings, coming from the source, than perfectly redigested AI clown vomit.

Note: I use AI tools every day. I have nothing against AI generated content, I have everything against AI advancements in human replacement, the "pretend" part. Classifying and returning knowledge is great. But I really dislike the trend of making AI more "human like", to the point of deceiving, such as pretending small talk and perfect human voice synthesis.

Tepix|1 year ago

If AI-generated speech is robot-like, dull and monotonous, it will be boring. I think we need human-like speech to make it interesting to listen to. What's your solution to this problem?

OTOH, i think the AI generated stuff should be clearly marked as such so there is no pretending.

givemeethekeys|1 year ago

I think they've set it up to sound like NPR meets patronizing customer support agent. They could easily set it up to sound exactly the way you / any listener would like to hear their podcasts.

But yeah - like electronic instruments, AI will take away the blue collar creative jobs, leaving behind a lot more noise and an even greater economic imbalance.

lannisterstark|1 year ago

>don't emulate small talk and quirky side jabs. It's pathetic.

>all I can feel is sadness and how cringe it is.

Hm, really? I came to the opposite conclusion. I explained this to a friend who can see very little, and usually relies on audio to experience a lot of the world and written content - it is especially hard because a lot of written content isn't available in audio form or isn't talked about it.

He was pretty excited about it, and so am I. Maybe it's not the use case for you, and that's fine, but going "this is pathetic, no one is using it, le cringe" is a bit far.

smusamashah|1 year ago

Is that audio all generated? All the pauses, breaths, speed ups and everything?

TranquilMarmot|1 year ago

From the "Help" modal:

"Illuminate is an experimental technology that uses AI to adapt content to your learning preferences. Illuminate generates audio with two AI-generated voices in conversation, discussing the key points of select papers. Illuminate is currently optimized for published computer science academic papers.

As an experimental product, the generated audio with two AI-generated voices in conversation may not always perfectly capture the nuances of the original research papers. Please be aware that there may be occasional errors or inconsistencies and that we are continually iterating to improve the user experience."

simon_kun|1 year ago

Google launched similar functionality in NotebookLM today. You can generate podcasts from a wide range of sources: https://blog.google/technology/ai/notebooklm-audio-overviews...

Looks like you can generate from Website URLs if you add them as sources to your notebook, as well as Slides, Docs, PDFs etc. Anything NotebookLM supports.

bahmboo|1 year ago

Interesting. Right now Google Illuminate only allows you to generate from PDFs that are on Arvix.org

aanet|1 year ago

What a fantastic idea! Great way to learn about those pesky research papers I keep downloading (but never get to reading them). I tried a few, e.g. Attention is All You Need, etc. The summary was fantastic, and the discussion was, well, informative.

Does anyone know how the summary was generated? (text summarization, I suppose?) Is there a bias towards "podcast-style discussion"? Not that I'm complaining about it - just that I found it helpful.

antirez|1 year ago

Related: [rumors] Audible is starting a pilot project to do just that with the ebooks.

lxgr|1 year ago

At this point, this is seems more like a question of "how soon", not if.

nnx|1 year ago

does this mean we could buy an ebook on Kindle and listen to it on Audible?

oidar|1 year ago

The voice models for this are very good. I'd love to have granular control over the output of a model like this locally.

willwade|1 year ago

Like SSML? See azure tts or google cloud tts, or ibm Watson or even old school system tts like SAPI voices on windows. But I hear you. In a VITS typical model system ssml isn’t standard. Piper tts does have it on the roadmap.

maxglute|1 year ago

AI voices sound particularly good at higher playback rates, with silence removal. Which is granted is an acquired taste, but common feature for podcast players so there's audience for it. Fast talkers feel more competent and one kind of stops interrogating on quality of speech.

bogwog|1 year ago

What does this accomplish? Who does this help? How does this make the world a better place?

This only seems like it would be useful for spammers trying to game platforms, which is silly because spam is probably the number one thing bringing down the quality of Google's own products and services.

throwaway81523|1 year ago

How about making the program work in the other direction. It could take one of those 30 minute youtube tutorial videos that is full of fluff and music, and turn it into an instructables-like text article with a few still pictures.

tambourine_man|1 year ago

This is as impressive as it is scary and creepy.

It also tells us something about humans, because it really does feel more engaging having two voices discussing a subject than simple text-to-speech, even though the information density is smaller.

disqard|1 year ago

Oral communication is one of the oldest and most powerful inter-human channels (possibly only facial expressions are more primal and powerful) [0]

LLMs have "hacked" this channel, and can participate in a 1:1 conversation with a human (via text chat).

With good text <--> speech, machines can participate in a 1:1 oral conversation with a human.

I'm with you: this is hella scary and creepy.

[0] Walter J Ong: "Orality and Literacy".

theage|1 year ago

The choice of intonement even mimics creatives which I'm sure they'll love. The vocal fry, talking through a forced smile, bumbling host is so typical. Only, no one minds demanding better from a robot so it's even more excruciating fluff with no possible parasocial angle.

Limiting choice to frivolous voices is really testing the waters for how people will respond to fully acted voice gen from them, they want that trust from the creative guild first. But for users who run into this rigid stuff it's going to be like fake generated grandma pics in your google recipe modals.

Analemma_|1 year ago

Books I can understand, but I'm genuinely curious: would anyone here find it useful to hear scientific papers as narrated audio? Maybe it depends on the field, but when I read e.g. an ML paper, I almost always have to go through it line-by-line with a pen and scratchpad, jumping back and forth and taking notes, to be sure I've actually "got it". Sometimes I might read a paragraph a dozen times. I can't see myself getting any value out of this, but I'm interested if others would find it useful.

creativenolo|1 year ago

I’m not sure “hear scientific papers as narrated audio” best describes what this is. From the link:

> Illuminate generates audio with two AI-generated voices in conversation, discussing the key points of select papers.

yencabulator|1 year ago

Maybe I'm the odd one out but "That's interesting. Can you elaborate more?", "Good question", "That sounds like a clever way" etc were annoying filler.

fabmilo|1 year ago

so much pleasantry so much fluff. reduce the noise. get to the point.

C-Loftus|1 year ago

Synthesized voices are legitimately a great way to read more and give your eyes a break. I personally prefer just converting a page or book to an audiobook myself locally. The new piper TTS models are easy to run locally and work very well. I made a simple CLI application and some other folks here liked it so figured I post it.

https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook

frays|1 year ago

Thanks for sharing, I tried to build and set this up on my Macbook (ARM/M1) but seems that Piper currently doesn't support MacOS yet.

This is a very useful tool, I will Star it and wait until Piper supports MacOS in the future.

SeanAnderson|1 year ago

I'm fairly excited for this use case. I recently made the switch from Audible to Libby for my audiobook needs. Overall, it's been good/fine, but I get disappointed when the library only has text copies of a book I want to listen to. Often times they aren't especially popular books so it seems unlikely they'll get a voiceover anytime soon. Using AI to narrate these books will solve a real problem I experience currently :)

colesantiago|1 year ago

So podcasts are now automated, anything with a speaker or a screen is now assumed to be not human.

Is this supposed to be a good thing that we want to accelerate (e/acc) towards?

Jeff_Brown|1 year ago

If can tell where content came from, it's fine with me. If a host of paid spammers or bots can astroturf an opinion and fool me into thinking they are a wide demographic, that's a problem. And it is -- but it predates LLMs.

throwthrowuknow|1 year ago

Man, it’s going to blow your mind when you realize that all the talking heads aren’t real and never were.

thisoneworks|1 year ago

I honestly don't think this is all that big. What we are seeing has been possible for more than 6 months now(?) with gpt4 and elevenlabs, its just put together in a nice little demo website and with what seems like a multi-modal model(?) trained on nytimes the daily episodes lol. And no i don't think this will gain all that much traction. We will keep valuing authentic human interaction more and more.

consf|1 year ago

[deleted]

hiby007|1 year ago

Why I feel this will end up on https://killedbygoogle.com/

pb7|1 year ago

Maybe because of the big "EXPERIMENT" badge next to the name?

gundmc|1 year ago

I think it's more likely this will end up merged as part of another offering. If it feels more like a feature than a product, which I think is true of a lot of things on that list.

israrkhan|1 year ago

Great... a new era of autogenerated podcasts is here.

timonoko|1 year ago

Works surprisingly well. I actually bothered to listen "discussions" about these boring-looking papers.

English is particularly bad to read aloud because it is like programming language Fortran based on immutable tokens. If you want tonal variety, you have to understand the content.

Some other languages modify the tokens themselves, so just one word can be pompous, comical, uneducated etc.

ancorevard|1 year ago

Are there any services like this that exist with an API?

I would like to send a text and then get back a podcast dialog between two people.

layman51|1 year ago

Did anyone else notice that according to the generation info, each recording was created on 12/31/69 at 4:00 PM?

oneepic|1 year ago

That lines up with 1/1/70 0:00 UTC, but that's also hilarious.

marviel|1 year ago

I'm bullish on podcasts as a Passive learning counterpart to the Active learning style in traditional educational instruction. Will be releasing a general purpose podcast generator for educational purposes in reasonote.com within the next few days, along with the rest of the core featureset.

bluelightning2k|1 year ago

This is really cool. Although I wouldn't put money on a Google project sticking around even if it was a full fledged product!

More of a tech demo than anything else.

What's wild about this is that the voices seem way better than GCP's TTS that I've seen. Any way to get those voices as an API?

bluelightning2k|1 year ago

Self-answer but leaving in case anyone else has the same question... seems there are some new options in GCP TTS. Both "studio" and "jorney" are new since I last checked (and I check pretty often).

srameshc|1 year ago

We are working on something content driven (for an ad or subscription model) with lot of effort and time and I am concerned how this technology will affect all that effort and eventually monetization ideas. But I can see how helpful this tool can be for learning new stuff.

oulipo|1 year ago

Why not, if you could also interject with questions, remarks, or "cut the chase" like remarks.

Also it's weird that they focus only on AI papers in the demo, and not more interesting social stuff, like environment protection, climate change, etc

ftmch|1 year ago

Guess they want to avoid any political backlash that could arise from topics like that, which will happen inevitably.

sandspar|1 year ago

Google's fingers get burned whenever it lets its AI touch social topics.

ants_everywhere|1 year ago

This is a good idea and well executed. I think the hard part now is pointing it in an appropriate direction.

If it's just used for generating low quality robo content like we see on TikTok and YouTube then it's not so interesting.

ElijahLynn|1 year ago

I've been meaning be the all you need is attention paper for yours and never have. And I finally listened to that little generated interview as their first example. I think this is going to be very very useful to me!

greesil|1 year ago

Can't wait to hear some hallucinated alternative facts in a hot new podcast.

Ninjinka|1 year ago

the Lexification/Roganization/Dwarkeshing/Hubermanning of reading

SpencerBratman|1 year ago

founder of podera.ai here, we're building this right now (turn anything into a podcast) with custom voices, customization, and more. would love some hn feedback!

surfingdino|1 year ago

Amazing. I see great future ahead. We are already able to turn audiobooks into eBooks and Illuminate finally completes the circle of content regurgitation.

yunohn|1 year ago

I listened to multiple demos, the pauses and vocal intonations sound so fake. They’re inserted at odd times that a real human speaker would not.

dpflan|1 year ago

Why is this appealing?

Why would one prefer this AI conversation to the actual source?

Can these be agents and allow the listener to ask questions / interact?

lying4fun|1 year ago

many times I’ve wanted to listen to a summarisation of a chapter from a textbook I’m reading. this can be useful in at least 3 ways:

1) it prepares me for the real studying. by being exposed to the gist of the material before actual studying, im very confident that the subsequent real study session would be more effective

2) i can brush up easily on key concepts, if im unable to sit properly, eg while commuting. but even if i were, a math textbook can be too dense for this purpose, and i often just want to refresh my memory on key concepts. and often im tired of _reading_ symbols or words, that’s when id prefer to actually _listen_, in a way, using a muscle that’s not tired

3) if im struggling with something, i can play this 5min chapter explanation multiple times a day throughout the week, while doing stuff, and engaging with it in a casual way. i think this would “soften” the struggle tremendously, and increase the chances of grasping the thing next time i tackle it

also id like a “temperature” knob, that i could tweak for how much in detail i want it to go

jamalaramala|1 year ago

By now, we can find thousands of hours of discussions online about popular papers such as "Attention is All You Need". It should be possible to generate something similar without using the paper as a source -- and I suspect that's what the AI does.

In other words: I suspect that the output is heavily derivative from online discussions, and not based on the papers.

Of course, the real proof would be to see the output for entirely new papers.

GaggiX|1 year ago

There are much newer papers shown than "Attention is All You Need" (all of them?) and much less talked about (probably all of them, too).

It shouldn't be surprising that a LLM is able to understand a paper, just upload one to Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

GaggiX|1 year ago

Did they removed the book section? I can only find the "papers" section now.

ansk|1 year ago

Imagine reading a math or programming textbook where each statement was true with probability 0.95.

sno129|1 year ago

Plenty of mistakes in textbooks and research articles, it's possible the probability is already even lower.

throwthrowuknow|1 year ago

errata. Also real humans often make mistakes in live interviews. The biggest difference is that eventually these fake humans will have lower error rates than real ones.

WalterBright|1 year ago

Didn't Amazon get in trouble for Kindles that read books out loud?

motoxpro|1 year ago

This is insane! To be able to listen to a conversation to learn about any topic is amazing. Maybe it's just me because I listen to so many podcasts but this is Planet Money or The Indicator from NPR about anything.

Definitely one of the coolest things I have seen an LLM do.

Animats|1 year ago

Why did they have to call an audio system "Illuminate"?

cma|1 year ago

It's not in the decorating a page in gold leaf or lighting up something senses of the word.

srik|1 year ago

Nothing is real anymore.

airstrike|1 year ago

Might as well dive into the deep end of the metaverse

RobMurray|1 year ago

I couldn't listen for more than a couple of minutes. It's the usual repetitive, over wordy llm generated drivel.

MailleQuiMaille|1 year ago

How long until you are part of the conversation...?

OutOfHere|1 year ago

Can it make something bigger than 5 minutes?

Tepix|1 year ago

The audio for "AI for Low-Code for AI" is almost 8 minutes long.

alganet|1 year ago

Cool tech. Now we know that very soon no one will be able to trust podcasts or video narration.

Legend2440|1 year ago

You shouldn’t have been trusting podcasts in the first place, Joe Rogan says plenty of false things no AI required.

danesparza|1 year ago

I wonder how soon until this waitlisted service eventually gets thrown on the trash heap that Google Reader is on.

Building trust with your users is important, Google.

albert_e|1 year ago

the player always starts at 30:00 for me and plays a 4 to 7 minute cllip that seems complete but very brief

alenwithoutproc|1 year ago

it would be really cool if we’d have a clubhouse-style gen-ai feed for hn or reddit comments to listen to.

to me

belval|1 year ago

I guess I am in my grouchy old person phase but all I could think of what the Gilfoyle quote from Silicon Valley when presented with a talking refrigerator.

> "Bad enough it has to talk, does it need fake vocal tics...?" - Gilfoyle

Found it: https://youtu.be/APlmfdbjmUY?si=b4-rgkxeXigU_un_&t=179

drivers99|1 year ago

I would want to select a voice without vocal fry, which one of the voices in these demos has.

CatWChainsaw|1 year ago

So it will immediately be trashed by GenAI bullshit and killedbygoogle within three years, right?

nonrandomstring|1 year ago

I think I just discovered a new emotion. Simultaneous feelings of excitement and disappointment.

No matter how great the idea, it's hard to stay excited for more than a few microseconds at the sight of the word "Google". I can already hear the gravediggers shovels preparing a plot in the Google graveyard, and hear the sobs of the people who built their lives, workflows, even jobs and businesses around something that will be tossed aside as soon as it stops being someone's pet play-thing at Google.

A strange ambivalent feeling of hope already tarnished with tragedy.

franze|1 year ago

Oh, another Google Waitlist...

0xedd|1 year ago

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consf|1 year ago

[deleted]