At Journalism.co.uk, we like to experiment with the latest tools to see whether they are of any use to journalists. To test the strengths and weaknesses of the new Google product NotebookLM, we submitted a script detailing the topics and sessions of our upcoming conference.
Pros: The conversation sounds very natural and human-like, and you can listen to the full 17 minutes without realising that there was zero human input. Also, it’s free and pretty fast.
Cons: The tool repeats itself a lot. Once you hear a few generated “episodes”, you start to notice the speech pattern. Also, we counted at least four “That’s a million dollar question” said in just 17 minutes. If true, by answering these questions at Newsrewired – which we will – we should pocket £4m. It’s unclear who will pay though.
Listen to our first (and maybe last) AI-generated episode about Newsrewired yourself and let us know your thoughts. See you in November!