In this case, Facebook’s 99-page user policy. The results, embedded in the story, are worth a listen. This is is some serious sci-fi shit compared to ChatGPT.
Archive link … unfortunately, as I feared, the audio didn’t work for me. Here is the direct link to the clip.
I edited the title because people thought this was about actual podcasts. It just generates conversational audio about the content.
Google discovered how to insert audio ads into text.
“Innovation”
There are ads in them now? I didn’t encounter any when using it a few days ago.
I just generated one and didn’t hear any ads.
Why does Google do anything?
A 10 minute audio has far more valuable ad inventory than a few paragraphs of text.
I’m sure they’ll start inserting ads as soon as they add the inventory to Google Ads Manager.
Sometimes they just do research. Like when their employees made transformers and nothing came of them until Open AI capitalized on it.
They make cool stuff, but they are ultimately an advertising company (as in that’s their main source of revenue). So by all means enjoy the cool stuff, just proceed with caution and of course assume nothing is permanent!
I have a feeling this experiment would sooner get the axe than have ads injected. There was initially a waiting list, but just a few days in it was completely open to the public.
Guarantee someone’s going to generate a bubbly podcast of Mein Kampf or Project 2025.
I know all the cool kids hate on AI, but as someone out of the loop, that ‘podcast’ is really impressive. I guess it speaks to how a influential certain style of podcasting is (from the likes of NPR) that a machine can copy it the same as other humans do.
As for the embedded link, this works for me (and others on the same site as me), but it might not for others:
I don’t know that it’s influential so much as formulaic. It’s been working for them for decades. And without it, we’d never have gotten Schweddy Balls, and that’s a worse timeline.
For real fun, submit your resume (that shit’s already all over online; Google can have it) and listen to NPR hosts take 7 minutes to describe your career arc.
I think that it is impressive, but not necessarily that useful? In particular, you can’t really trust what they’re saying to be accurate so it doesn’t actually give you that much usable information.
Very cool, but I’m not sure what I would actually use it for.
This is just fancy transcription, the only thing you can’t trust it to be saying is the article itself…
No, the podcast can absolutely missrepresent the thing that it’s sumarizing. The podcast also adds commentary, and I think it’s especially this commentary that I find unreliable.
Ah, if it also adds commentary then sure. When I tested it out a few times it was just retelling the articles verbatim.
