AI-Generated Audio Is Entering the Podcast World

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2024

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you were intrigued—or disturbed—by the artificial intelligence podcast on your Spotify Wrapped, you may wonder how AI audio works. Audio Overview is a feature of the tool NotebookLM, released by Google, that allows for the creation of short podcasts with AI “hosts” summarizing information. But questions remain about the accuracy, usefulness and environmental impacts of this application. Host Rachel Feltman and associate news editor Allison Parshall are joined by Google Labs’ editorial director Steven Johnson and AI researchers Anjana Susarla and Emily Bender to assess the promise of this buzzy tech. Recommended reading: Google’s Project Green Light Uses AI to Take on City Traffic Can One Chatbot Catch Another’s Lies? Please Don’t Ask AI If Something Is Poisonous E-mail us at sciencequickly@sciam.com if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new every day: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter. Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by Rachel Feltman with guest Allison Parshall with fact-checking by Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Here's the truth about AI.
0:02.0	AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into.
0:05.0	ServiceNow puts AI to work for people across your business,
0:09.0	removing friction and frustration for your employees,
0:12.0	supercharging productivity for your developers,
0:15.0	providing intelligent tools for your service agents to make customers happier.
0:19.0	All built into a single platform you can
0:21.9	use right now. That's why the world works with ServiceNow. Visit ServiceNow.com
0:27.8	slash UK slash AI for people. For Scientific American Science quickly, this is Rachel Feldman.
0:36.0	If you are one of the many folks who eagerly
0:38.6	awaits the arrival of Spotify wrapped each December, you might have noticed something a little
0:43.5	extra in this year's drop. An AI-generated podcast where two people discuss your music preferences
0:51.4	and trends. If you're anything like me, that feature raised some questions for you, like how and why
0:59.1	on earth?
1:00.1	Luckily, we already had an episode in the works about Google's new AI audio tool.
1:05.2	Here to tell us all about how it works and what it means is Siam Associate News Editor Alison
1:10.1	Partial.
1:15.8	Allison, thanks so much for coming on the pod again. Always a pleasure to have you.
1:18.4	Thanks for having me. Happy to be a friend of the pod or whatever.
1:22.0	So we're talking about AI today.
1:25.9	Yes. Rachel. Have you heard of Notebook L.M?
1:32.4	I've heard of it. I have not tried it yet. So my knowledge is limited.
	...

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