Imagine being able to turn your documents into engaging, podcast-like discussions. You can upload any text, from company reports to study notes, and in just a few clicks, it creates a realistic conversation between two AI personas discussing the content. It’s like having an instant expert breakdown of complex information, making it easier to digest.
Let’s talk about an amazing AI tool with a wide range of applications at work, home, in a classroom, and elsewhere.
The idea starts with digital notebooks, which you might be using already for collecting information. We’re talking about things like Evernote, Notion, the Notes app on iPhones, and OneNote in Microsoft products. These have been available for years, and recently most have enhanced it with AI – such as being able to summarise documents and even “chat” with them.
Google’s offering in this area, Google NotebookLM, is similar. As with the other tools, you upload documents into collections for easy organisation, searching, and those basic AI tools like chatting and summarising.
But NotebookLM has a new jaw-dropping feature: creating podcast-like interviews from your material.
You upload a collection of documents into a notebook, press a button, and it automatically creates a two-person conversation about the documents.
These are not just robotic, AI-sounding voices either. It’s an incredibly realistic and conversational experience, and if you didn’t know it was AI, you wouldn’t guess it.
How could you use this? Here are some examples:
📊 You could upload a company’s annual report to find out more about it.
🧐 For understanding a complex report, you upload it and listen to a conversation about it.
🗳️ For a complex and nuanced political issue like last year’s Voice referendum, you could upload the Australian Constitution and various arguments for and against the proposal.
📚 Students could upload information about a topic they are studying.
📝 I uploaded all my blog posts about AI over the last two years, and the AI-generated conversation was impressively well-structured and organised.
It’s fascinating and opens up so many possibilities, whether you need to summarise complex documents for work, help your kids with their schoolwork, or just want a new way to consume information.
As an example for you, I uploaded my book “Disruption by Design” and – within minutes – had a full 15-minute podcast conversation about it. Listen to it here (the AI-generated bit starts at about the 6:20 mark):
