At Home with Tech

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Tag: A.I.

April 20, 2025

Here’s What Happened When I Tried to Create an AI-Generated Podcast about my Blog

I invited Google’s NotebookLM to create “deep dive” podcasts based on a few of my blog posts, and here are the stunningly good results.

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.

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September 17, 2017

Don’t Ask My Mommy. Ask Google.

How are you supposed to survive in a computerized world? If you’re a seven year old, ask a computer… of course! If this gives you a little agita as an adult human being in the real world, you might want to read on…

So, my wife and I were visiting another family’s house to pick up our seven-year-old son from his play date the other day. The adults were chatting a bit before the handover as the kids wrapped up their activity, which happened to be playing Minecraft, a popular videogame where you create your own worlds.

Then I noticed the kids ran into some kind of challenge in the game, and this is what I overheard…

Human child #1:
“How do you build the portal to the End in Minecraft?”

Human child #2:
“I don’t think my mommy knows how to do that…”

Human child #1:
“Don’t ask my mommy. Ask Google Home. Maybe… Siri.”
(They didn’t have an Alexa in this particular home. But I don’t want to leave Amazon out of the conversation.)

A.I. Always has an Answer
All right. Let’s pause right there to discuss the significance of this interchange. A couple of seven-year old-boys have decided to bypass their parents (moms) and go right to today’s A.I. to solve their problem.

Hey, it’s not like I don’t Google questions all of the time at my computer, but I was a little shocked at how flesh and blood parents were suddenly and completely eliminated from the equation.

Now granted, in this particular situation, these adults wouldn’t have known how to get to the ‘End.’ So, you’ve got to give the kids some points for their instincts.
(That night, after Googling ‘the End,’ I learned that it’s the third and final dimension in Minecraft.)

Okay… the kids were trying to figure out a shortcut to the end of the game.
(Is that cheating? Or is it simply being innovative… like beating the Kobayashi Maru test?)

Anyway…

Google Home couldn’t articulate a useful answer, but the young hackers-in-training got some traction with Siri on the resident iPad. Siri opened up a wikiHow page for them, which held some key details.

Apparently, getting to the End requires you first to go to the Nether.
(I have no idea what I’m talking about.)

The Lesson of the Journey
Guess what… their little online research project worked! The wikiHow page contained instructions on how to build a portal to the Nether, which the kids promptly executed.

I heard… “OMG… we’re going to the End! This is so great!!”

For the record, their progress halted at the Nether. The map to the End remained out of reach. But my son was super excited by the prospect that they were moving in the right direction.
(He really loves exploring this vast digital world. He also enjoys reading Minecraft adventures in physical books and looking through how-to-build Minecraft books.)

Discounted Daddy
To be honest, I felt a little schadenfreude to observe their quest for the End not end in total success.

Because as a parent of a seven year old, I thought Daddy was still perceived as all knowing. Did you notice that neither boy even mentioned his father during the tech query?

No… I didn’t have the answer. And I don’t think the other daddy would have had it either… without Googling a bit.
(That said, he’s very much at home with his tech.)

And no… this is not a gender thing about why the kids bypassed their daddies.
It’s a species thing about why the human adults were circumvented to quickly get to preferred artificial intelligence.

And that seven year olds already expects today’s A.I. to be able to correctly answer any question.

What’s the Truth?
Okay, Daddy…
I suddenly realize this is going to require some immediate focus as a parent.

Because even though yes… there’s an answer to any question you pose to a search engine, there’s actually a thousand answers, if not more.

As an adult, it’s your job to figure out the ‘truth’ on any number of topics.
(And that’s harder today than ever.)

And that’s going to remain an ongoing challenge for every human for the foreseeable future.

For an elementary school-aged child who can now simply project a question into a room, and an A.I. enabled speaker immediately responds, that’s a resource that really needs some adult-level perspective.

Otherwise we won’t have to wait until advanced artificial intelligence or the singularity arrives for humans to hand over all of the keys to knowledge and independent understanding.

Wow.
I’ve got some work to do.

Daddy (human) is on it.

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