There is an online tool called NotebookLM by Google that takes the ideas of Jupyter Notebook as a front end and using whatever backend foundational model Google has to then create a set of outputs including what feels like a podcast.

I decided to check it out and since it is able to take a fairly wide range of input sources (URLs, text etc), I fed it the RSS feed to this blog – https://harishpillay.com/feed. Real Simple Syndication (RSS) has been around for as long as blogs etc have been and if you want to find out what the RSS feed of a site is, you can use this: https://www.rsslookup.com/.

It they went off and did the analysis of the contents of the feed and also to generate the audio/podcast.

The audio/podcast does sort of do some justice to the RSS feeds fed in. There are some interesting ways the contents were interpreted. It is about 21 minutes long.

The way NotebookLM did the analysis left me less impressed. It did not go into the various posts and seems to have just taken the RSS links and did, what I think, is a less than useful output. I queried about the post on the 20th anniversary of my SCDF deployment following the Indian Ocean Tsunami and it was very shallow in what it came back with. It seems to me that it is not diving into the links in the RSS feed before doing any analysis. I might have to feed each link in its entirety for NotebookLM to come back with something useful.

The value of the audio portion of NotebookLM to take in the contents of what I wrote and then having a conversation around it, is an interesting way of critiquing one’s work. Noting that the audio/podcast is always positive (I guess the system prompt makes that so), it is a useful technique nonetheless.

One can write a block of text, keep it aside, come back a hour later, read it out loud and then edit again and rinse and repeat. We’ve all done that and all of the “discussions” are only going on in one’s head. By having the audio/podcast to then discuss your writing/post, it does add a new flavour and technique on evaluating what one writes. Perhaps it helps in sharpening the prose and ideas and giving greater clarity to the thinking.