[ljoshua]

NotebookLM audio overviews/podcasts have been an absolute boon for my homeschooled kids. They devour audiobooks and podcasts, and they love learning by listening to these first. Then when we come together for class, we discuss what was covered, and can spend time diving into specifics or doing activities based on the content. It’s super nice to have another option for a learning medium here.

To generate them, we’ve scanned the physical book pages, and then with a simple Python script fed the images into GCP’s Document AI to extract the text en-masse, and concatenated the results together into a text-only version of the chapter. Give that text to NotebookLM and run with it.

[SecretDreams]

I've used them. They're very nifty. Google did good here.

One thing I'll note is they only cover the "high level" aspects. No depth. I'd recommend them for someone who is either already very knowledgeable or for someone not at all knowledgeable who is looking for an overview before they plan to do deeper learning/studying through reading.

[bbatsell]

> or for someone not at all knowledgeable who is looking for an overview before they plan to do deeper learning/studying through reading

Yep. This is what I have used them (sparingly) for — a scaffold to build the deeper learning onto. My brain struggles to retain information when it doesn’t have a high-level understanding of how/why a system works and how individual parts connect and interact, even if it is all eventually revealed later.

[rosquillas]

Why not simply upload the pdf version of the scanned book or document? Extracting the text out of a scanned document via GCP Document AI API sounds like unnecessary use of resources

[ljoshua]

I was running into context window issues doing this. I could have gone in and split up the scanned book into chapters or something to get around this, and did that for a couple of subjects. But it wasn't too much work (and literally cost me pennies, like six of them) to get the pure text extract, and it's pretty easy to work with now. (Besides, which random dev doesn't love a little side challenge to explore new APIs at home every now and then? ;) )

[suddenlybananas]

I hope you encourage your kids to actually read as well.

[ljoshua]

Oh don’t worry, they make excellent use of their library cards. :)

[mleonhard]

> for my homeschooled kids

Learning requires making mistakes. Kids need to learn social skills in low-stakes environments. School is the best environment for this. When a person misses this part of their childhood education, they may struggle to learn these skills later in life.

[ljoshua]

It sounds like you may be speaking from experience, and if so, I respect that.

My kids have done both public schooling and now homeschooling. For a variety of personal reasons, public schooling was not going to be an option for a couple of them, so we're trying this out now and it has been successful. We are tightly integrated into a very active church group, and they have lots of social interactions on a regular basis there, as well as opportunities with other homeschooled kids around town.

It's definitely a balance, and there's no one silver bullet on either side of the fence, but the best any of us can do is actively strive for giving each child the best and most appropriate experiences for them.