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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

This is impressive from a technical point of view and probably useful from an educational one; I really like the idea that a piece of text can be transformed into any kind of media format easily, depending on your preferences. As recently as a year ago I was using Apple’s text to speech tool to listen to Wikipedia articles while biking, and needless to say, they weren’t very exciting to listen to.

But I don’t think it’s much of a threat to actual podcasts, which tend to be successful because of the personalities of the hosts and guests, and not because of the information they contain.

Which leads me to hope that the next versions of Notebook will allow more customization of the speakers’ voices, tone, education level, etc.

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> But I don’t think it’s much of a threat to actual podcasts, which tend to be successful because of the personalities of the hosts and guests, and not because of the information they contain.

I wonder if any “blended” podcasts will pop up, where a human host uses a tool like this for an artificial cohost.

Latent Space AI Engineering podcast does this with an AI cohost; mostly for intros and segues. A recent episode used it to summarise a Twitter AMA and while it’s usually used to good effect, that one was one of the first episodes the quality of the co host part was lacking, as it mispronounced things, and was a bit muddled in parts. That said, the podcast has been an incredibly useful and insightful regular listen for me.

hey that was me! yeah we've been amping up the ai content in the pod as you see, hopefully experimenting in tasteful ways.

I'm not super proud of the Twitter AMA one and if u listen back now i fixed many of the bad cutovers. I doubt i'll repeat it again on current tech.

thank you for listening! feedback and ideas welcome.

I think something like a Socratic dialog option would be useful as well.

It would be ideal if they made the SoundStorm model available via API.

Being able to automate words, I think, will reveal how important actual human connection is.

> We always start with a clear overview of the topic, you know, setting the stage. You’re never left wondering, “What am I even listening to?” And then from there, it’s all about maintaining a neutral stance, especially when it comes to, let’s say, potentially controversial topics.

Oh yeah, this is exactly why I listen to Oxide's podcast! (This is a joke. They often launch into topics with no explanation or context, and are unabashedly opinionated.)

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