It's all in the delivery
It's that naturalistic, teasing presentation that makes NotebookLM's new feature stand out from other AI products that generate capable text summaries. I felt like I was eavesdropping on two people who happened to be discussing my book in a cafe, except those people don't actually exist (and were probably algorithmically designed to praise the book).
Is this thing on?
Credit: Getty Images
Is this thing on? Credit: Getty Images
From the beginning, I loved the way a “podcast host” described the book as a story from “the land of floppy disks and dial-up modems” (a phrase I didn't use in the book). That same voice continues to tease “a little bit of Bill Gates hanging around the Microsoft office” right from the start, hinting at my favorite anecdote from the book before exploring it fully later in the summary.
When they get to that anecdote, fake podcast hosts continue with what seems like a natural conversational structure:
Voice 1: It's hard to deny the impact of something when your own CEO is secretly hooked.
Voice 2: Wait, are we talking about Bill Gates?
The back-and-forth style of the two-person “podcast” format also allows for some entertaining digressions from the main point of the book. When talking about the wormy movie star damsel in distress that appears in Minesweeper predecessor Minedfor example, AI summarizers seem to get a little distracted:
Voice 1: I have to ask, what kind of movies does a worm star in?
Voice 2: I'm afraid that detail has been lost in the sands of video game history.
Then there's the casual way the two “hosts” introduce the upgraded versions of Minesweeper which were designed to fix problems with the Microsoft original:
Voice 1: Finally, the community came up with a more elegant solution.
Voice 2: Let me guess. They created a new version of Minesweeper.
Voice 1: Exactly.
Voice 2: I finished the day before.
The two-person format helps encourage a smooth, easy pace in the presentation of dense information, with pauses that sound natural and repetitions that help emphasize key points. When an ersatz podcaster talks about the phenomenon of “this incredibly addictive puzzle game [being] preinstalled on virtually every computer,” for example, the other voice may respond with the phrase “on all computers” with just the right amount of inquisitive interest. Or when an AI voice intones that “it was discovered that the original Minesweeper had a flaw in the way it generated random boards”, the other voice chimes in and exclaims “A flaw!” with perfect timing and a sense of surprise.