Kevin's Meandering Mind

I promise, I am not a shill for Google, but I keep stumbling across some of their AI experimental platforms, and so as part of my ongoing push to experiment with AI, I keep playing around.

The latest is something called Learn About, and as the title indicates, it is built for the curious. I liked it.

Once you give it a topic, the AI engine gets to work, pulling together resources from across the Web (videos, conversational chats in placed like Reddit, PDF resources, etc.) and begins to create an outline for learning, including suggested further lines of inquiry. It makes charts from its information database, and offers to “go deeper” or “simplify” its results for you.

It even periodically tosses in little quizzes and check-ins, to ensure you are thinking about what it is presenting to you.

I am reading the book Atlas Obscura: Wild Life and when I came across a section about bird song and music notation. I wanted to learn more, so I went into Learn About, and darned if it didn’t send me down some fascinating rabbit holes with all sorts of interesting corners of information. I learned about how music composers are inspired by bird songs, how spectrograms can track pitches of birds, how bird song can help with conservation efforts, how individual birds have their own songs, and more.

I am wondering now, how to merge the inquiry in this Learn About platform with Google’s other platforms, including NotebookLM. That’s my next step.

Peace (singing it in song),
Kevin

Google continues to experiment and expand the use of AI-generated audio. It’s “podcast” feature in its NotebookLM is interesting (and a bit unsettling) but Google also has its Illuminate platform. Illuminate turns PDF research documents into audio discussions by parsing out the main ideas and creating a ‘discussion’ among AI voices.

I tried it out, and found a paper about Connected Learning in the Illuminate library. Within seconds, it had created a three minute audio file, with transcripts, and access to the original document. Illiuminate also allows you to open a chat box and ask questions of the document itself as you listen to the audio analysis. (The responses are text, not audio, but I suspect at some point, that could change.)

Here is an article about Google’s work on audio.

Here is a link to my Illuminate file on Connected Learning. It will probably force you to make an account, so decide that for yourself. The image above shows you what I am seeing, except I layered a screenshot of the actual PDF article onto the dashboard itself. You can download the audio file for use elsewhere. (Listen to the file generated for Connected Learning here, via Vocaroo hosting).

I think this could be an interesting way to parse through research documents, and gather information. The audio will likely get better. You can’t upload PDFs directly, but you can provide URLs for Illuminate to use.

Is this good? Bad? Again, as with the audio feature in NotebookLM, I am not yet sure how to think about it. But I remain curious. And continue to play.

Peace (diving in),
Kevin