Google’s new GenAI podcast tool is exciting but how useful is it for business?

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Google is having its own ChatGPT moment. Technologists, scientists and OpenAI founder Sam Altman have been praising a feature added by NotebookLM, a free online research tool that Alphabet released last year.

Uploading documents to the site allows users to answer questions about their content or synthesize it into summaries, briefing notes and more. Now it can also turn that content into an eerily human-sounding podcast. The male and female AI-generated hosts not only have sonorous, FM-radio voices but punctuate their conversations with ums, pauses and catchy phrases like “get this." The banter sounds so seamless that you’d be forgiven for thinking the conversation was between people.

I’ve used the tool to generate a 15-minute podcast about a 208-page presentation, which would have taken an hour or more to read, while others have used it to generate deep dives into research papers or their own diaries. NotebookLM has inspired a burst of viral experimentation similar to the kind that first met ChatGPT. The system runs on Google’s flagship AI model Gemini 1.5, which also powers the ‘AI overviews’ that are now replacing the top results of many Google searches; but it also has its own secret sauce to make the voices sound so human.

“There’s some new audio technology in there that is, I don’t think, fully public," Steven Johnson, Google’s editorial director of NotebookLM, tells me. “It’s the most realistic conversation that a computer has ever generated." He added that there had been a “huge spike" in NotebookLM’s usage since it added the podcast-generator. Commentators have called the feature mind-blowing, while Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla, said