At Home with Tech

The written word, though certainly enduring, has plenty of competition out there. We all consume information in different ways. But quite frankly, photos, videos and podcasts are often more compelling and clickable.

Barrett’s Podcast?
I’ve occasionally thought about creating a companion At Home with Tech podcast, but that takes a fair amount of work to maintain. (It’s enough of a challenge for a busy dad to pump out the written version every week.)

That said, I did create this pilot podcast episode some years back.

How to Create Your Photo Archive in the Cloud: The Podcast

It was great fun to do… but too big of an ongoing lift.

ElevenLabs
Last year, I revisited the idea and considered applying a different solution using A.I. to more quickly generate my podcast. How? 

I first cloned my voice by digitizing it through ElevenLabs’ website. Then, I simply copied and pasted my blog’s text into ElevenLab’s interface to magically create a spoken version with my cloned voice! It was certainly much quicker than doing the voice work myself… not that I can’t do that.

Yes. Text to voice… BAM!

Here’s that pilot:

Should You Clone your Voice to Help Preserve your Legacy?

While certainly simpler and faster, I still didn’t greenlight my own podcast series. (I decided to stick with my core product.)

But I haven’t stopped pondering the challenge… and opportunity.

NotebookLM
A few months back, a friend of mine showed me a nifty Google trick using A.I. to magically create an audio podcast. Google’s tool is NotebookLM. He put it to work and generated an authentic sounding A.I. conversation about my career by simply loading my LinkedIn profile. 

Within minutes, a breezy 10-minute audio podcast appeared on his iPhone with two relaxed A.I. personalities chatting about my awesome life to date.

It was flattering, but also a bit weird to hear ‘people’ talking about me in this way. And beyond marveling at this parlor trick, I felt it wasn’t usable in a broader sense. (I wasn’t going to post this over-the-top publicity anywhere.)

I can Now Create my Podcast in One Click!
But I thought about NotebookLM again recently and navigated over to the URL: notebooklm.google to see how it’s been evolving.  

I realized this virtual research assistant actually has plenty of uses (like summarizing marketing plans, course reading, research notes, meeting transcripts and sales documents). 

And then, I spotted the ‘Audio Overview’ section in the top right of the page.  That’s the place where you generate the A.I. conversation about your topic. And there are any number of ways to feed in what you want the A.I. to absorb and then talk about (websites, PDFs, Google Docs and even simple text).

So, I uploaded a link to my recent blog post, and within a few minutes, my podcast was ready. Click. I listened to the likable pair of podcast hosts effortlessly discussing the detail from my blog. 

My jaw dropped. It all felt like magic. I immediately downloaded the file.
Here it is:

Safe Garden Hose Watering Solutions

Yes, I’ve done a bit of light editing to it using GarageBand. I’ve also trimmed out a few sentences where the A.I. rambled on in a few places. (I reserve that luxury for myself, thank you very much.) Then, I added in some music at the top and back. But that was it. Easy.

Here are a couple more…

My Kitchen’s Unexplained Ping: A Tech Mystery

UPS Battery Replacement: Protecting Your Computer from a Blackout

The Voices Sound So Real
NotebookLM’s A.I. voices are remarkably life-like. The casual banter spoken between this virtual woman-and-man team seems especially friendly and so authentic. 

The result speaks for itself. That said, as incredible as this may appear, some of the ‘summarizing’ occasionally offered additional ‘thinking’ that fell slightly outside of my core perspective. (I suppose a real person could also do that.) 

Still, I think this auto-generated podcast could be a nice companion piece that offers an alternate way to consume the essence of my blog’s content. 

Will You Enjoy Listening to This?
We’ll see if I add in this A.I. podcast as an ongoing feature to my blogging. It’s hard to know if everyone (anyone) wants to regularly listen to two virtual coffee-talk personalities doing a deep-dive exploration of my blog.

But for now, I’ve got to admit… NotebookLM is much more than an amazing parlor trick.