alt Hacker NewsI 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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I found notebookLM to consistently make up about 20% of it's summary. Entertaining but unreliable.
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.
I've found notebookLM summaries to be too high-level and oversimplified to be useful. Hopefully in a few years they can go deeper.
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.
Just listen to actual audio books... literally doing double the work for no benefit... why?
> You have to go read it yourself afterwards
Or before! Either is mandatory to actually learn the content.
> You have to go read it yourself afterwards
^ this is important.
Otherwise you may very well be missing anything really surprising or novel.
See for example https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/after-software-eats-the... , an experience report of NotebookLM where
> It was remarkable to see how many errors could be stuffed into 5 minutes of vacuous conversation. What was even more striking was that the errors systematically pointed in a particular direction. In every instance, the model took an argument that was at least notionally surprising, and yanked it hard in the direction of banality.