Turn anything into a podcast
After Thrive Protocol’s Ben West read Evan Hatch’s popular explainer on who Len Sassaman is — the man Polymarket briefly named most likely to be Satoshi Nakamoto — he uploaded the article to Google’s NotebookLM Audio Overviews.
It quickly produced a 12-minute podcast, with two jokey hosts bantering as they revealed the story of Len Sassaman.
I played the result to my girlfriend to test her reaction before revealing it was completely AI-generated. She says she was totally fooled.
“That completely sounds like people crapping on in a podcast,” she says.
Other people have been just as impressed with Audio Overviews, which enables users to upload website or YouTube links, PDFs, plain text, Google Docs and slides.
Audio Overview then provides a deep dive into the content in the form of a conversational-style podcast, with two natural-sounding voices interrupting each other and laughing at each other’s lame jokes.
(Ben West/X)
A16z partner Olivia Moore uploaded 200 pages of court documents to the service.
“It created a true crime podcast that is better than 90% of what’s out there now… And ends with the hosts debating the ethics of the genre.”
Business Insider’s Ana Altchek also tested the software and said the voices are higher quality than anything else on the market, including ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode.
“Not only do the voices sound real, but the way the AI hosts bounce off each other and banter mimics the style and structure of a real podcast.”
She didn’t catch any obvious inaccuracies in the results, but that’s obviously a concern with AI-generated anything. So, while it’s probably a great way to get the gist of a bunch of complicated information in a compressed burst, you’ll still need to double-check facts before relying on them.
“It’s rare that I’m left awestruck by a tool that’s actually available to…
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