I somewhat consistently use notebookLM for podcasts of academic papers I'm reading in my PhD. You have to go read it yourself afterwards but it makes better use of time in the gym or doing dishes/groceries.

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ludicrousdispla an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I found notebookLM to consistently make up about 20% of it's summary. Entertaining but unreliable.

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nytesky 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The bantering of the podcast I found distracting and the breathless enthusiasm. I guess there was a way to make it more no nonsense? I found I lost content if tuned for brevity.

	▲	djsavvy 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I just use elevenreader for this. I copy in essays or whatever text I want to listen to and it works decently well. It's far from perfect, but certainly good enough. Sometimes I'll take deep research output and listen to it too that way.

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qnleigh 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've found notebookLM summaries to be too high-level and oversimplified to be useful. Hopefully in a few years they can go deeper.

	▲	SXX 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You can alao use NotebookLM's as source for Gemini app and ask it to do more in-depth summaries with custom prompting. This somewhat makes whole NotrbookLM less useful, but still.

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p4coder 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I also like doing that for topics that I am tangentially interested in. One minor thing that I find annoying is that the narrators switch roles in the middle of conversation. They start with the female voice explaining a concept to the male voice and suddenly they switch. In the meantime I have identified myself with the voice being explained to.

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shimman 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just listen to actual audio books... literally doing double the work for no benefit... why?

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blharr 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There aren't a lot of highly technical audiobooks or ones that give the same specificity that would be the same as an academic paper

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wolvoleo 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Not yet but it seems like they're getting to the point of AI narration finally being good enough to make any text an 'audiobook'.

Having said that I absolutely hate the audio format, I only used it when I had to drive or when I swam lanes. But these days I do neither.

	▲	coke12 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, reading verbatim from a technical paper is way too dense. You need a lot of filler words to slow it down and repetition to make it stick when read aloud.

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arthurcolle 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Writing a book takes like 2-3 years on average. Papers are published everyday. Having a cute two-person "conversational chat" w/ audio works for a lot of people vs. just reading a paper. "No benefit" to you perhaps. Don't generalize the lived experience.

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SecretDreams 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> You have to go read it yourself afterwards

Or before! Either is mandatory to actually learn the content.

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7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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