It’s all in the delivery
It’s that naturalistic, bantering 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 just 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?
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Right from the start, I was tickled by the way one “podcast host” described the book as a tale from “the land of floppy disks and dial-up modems” (a phrase I did not use in the book). That same voice goes on to tease “a bit of Bill Gates sneaking around the Microsoft office,” up front, hinting at my absolute favorite anecdote from the book before fully exploring it later in the summary.
When they do get to that anecdote, the fake podcast hosts segue in with what feels 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 allows for some entertaining digressions from the main point of the book, too. When discussing the wormy movie-star damsel-in-distress featured in Minesweeper predecessor Mined-Out, for instance, the AI summarizers seem to get a little distracted:
Voice 1: I have to ask, what kind of movies does a worm even star in?
Voice 2: I’m afraid that detail has been lost to the sands of gaming history.
Then there’s the casual way the two “hosts” bring up the improved versions of Minesweeper that were crafted to fix problems with Microsoft’s original:
Voice 1: So eventually 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: Called it a day on the old one.
The two-person format helps foster a gentle, easy rhythm to the presentation of dense information, with natural-sounding pauses and repetition that help emphasize key points. When one ersatz podcaster talks about the phenomenon of “this incredibly addictive puzzle game [being] pre-installed on practically every computer,” for instance, the other voice can answer back with the phrase “on every computer” with just the right amount of probing interest. Or when one AI voice intones that “it was discovered that the original Minesweeper had a flaw in how it generated random boards,” the other voice jumps in and exclaims “A flaw!” with pitch-perfect timing and a sense of surprise.
