Conversation is the new reading: Listen to a podcast about your notes or readings with free tools

The full text of this with examples is available on practical-ai.notion.site. And you can listen to a conversation about this text via NotebookLM.

ℹ️ What is text to podcast

Thanks to advances in both Large Language Models and voice synthesis, it is now possible to create very realistic multimedia versions of written documents. And they don’t just have to be simple audio versions of the text but even conversations about them in the form of a podcast or radio interview.

There are several free tools that will allow you to do this. This guide covers two

• NotebookLM.google
• Lettercast.ai

💬 Text-to-conversation: A new reading modality

Listening to text is becoming increasingly popular (as we can see with the rise of audiobooks and text-to-speech apps) and it has many advantages for cognition but also some limitations. The main one is metacognitive control. Listening while reading often improves attention but the attention becomes linear. In other words, it is hard to jump back and forth in the text to control the flow of information. It is also impossible to skim or scan while listening and thus other elements of metacognition become more difficult.

🧠 Metacognitive control

Conversation (when done in a natural way as all the text-to-podcast tools seem to be able to do) comes with built-in metacognitive controls. Spoken language in a conversational context has very different structure of reference and co-reference that is different even from a typical monologue. Conversation partners focus on maintaining attention and reinforce relationships that the written text can rely on vision to maintain. They also engage in much more repetition and conversation repair.

This can get quite messy in real life and not easy for somebody listening in passively but radio-style conversations improve on this mode by introducing an implicit third party on whose behalf the questions often get asked. Thus podcasts are often more powerful way of letting a novice in on a difficult subject than straight non-fiction narratives.

🪜Cognitive scaffolding

The best role of a conversation about a topic is as cognitive scaffolding. To build context and a sense of familiarity with a wide range of concepts. This is much harder through linear reading, particularly when one does not have sufficient context.

🤙 Strengths and weaknesses of the current technology

🗣️ Amazing voices with intonation

One thing that was holding text-to-speech back now was voices. Not so much the pronunciation of words or sentences but larger intonation patterns.

But this new generation of synthetic voices has completely solved this problem. We can now listen to completely realistic conversation that sounds as good as anything on the radio. So, we’re moving from text-to-speech to text-to-conversation.

🔡 Translation power of LLMs

The new Large Language Models are really good at taking any text and summarising it mostly accurately. They can also very easily and accurately translate this into conversation.

👁️ Hallucination and control of LLMs

However, the biggest problem at the moment is that LLMs do still make mistakes and are relatively hard to control over long stretches of context.

They have also been fine-tuned to be overly helpful in a particular way and may steer the conversation in ways that does not represent the text.

📌 Opportunities: Individualisation

The biggest opportunities here are giving each individual to create podcasts in the style of conversation that best suits them and even giving them a chance to change as their needs and/or preferences changes.

This is relatively trivial to enable through custom instructions - as some tools already do. But it is not straightforward for individuals to create or fine-tune these instructions. So the challenge is not just in creating the interfaces but also guiding users in taking advantage of them.

1️⃣ Converting notes to podcast with NotebookLM

NotebookLM is a free tool for AI-assisted notetaking. You can upload as many as 50 source documents, make your notes and combine them with AI summaries. But a new feature of NotebookLM is the possibility to create an audio overview.

👉 Example

Here’s an example of a podcast of a guide. Here’s a link directly to the NotebookLM.

Building your language muscle.mov

？How to use this

NotebookLM is free, you can create your account on Notebooklm.google . How to create a podcast:

1. Upload a single or more documents into the NotebookLM
2. Click on Notebook Guide
3. Click on Audio overview

You can listen:

• Within the notebook
• Download the audio file (note: the download is in .wav and may need to be converted into .mp3)

🤙 Pros and cons

• Pros Highly engaging voices Public sharing of recordings
• Cons No way (at the moment) to only have a recording of a subset of the notebook (you have to create a separate notebook for each document) No way to give additional instructions of what the recording should be like No way to subscribe to recordings in a podcast player

2️⃣ Make a podcast out of a paper with Lettercast.ai

Lettercast.ai is a free service that can

Note: It is not clear what the privacy policies or future pricing plans are. Only use it for public documents such as papers or blog posts.

👉 Example

You can listen to an example podcast created

Lettercast.ai also offers predefined feeds of some predefined sources of information:

• Trending Buisness News (lettercast.ai)
• Trending AI Papers (lettercast.ai)

？How to use it

You can create an account for free or even use it without an account. You can create a podcast in two steps:

🏁 Getting started

1. Upload a file or paste in a link to a page with text
2. Click submit button and a audio file will appear - this may take a few minutes

🎧 Listening options

You can listen in two ways:

1. On the website directly
2. Subscribe to the feed to listen to new creations in your podcast player

➕ Advanced creation options

There are other advanced options you have:

1. Choose whether there is a conversation or just a single speaker
2. Choose whether you want a summary or an audio of the whole file
3. Give custom instructions about what you want to do

♻️ Alternatives

There are many other tools that focus on creating podcasts using AI voices. Some examples are:

• Podcastle: All-in-One Podcast Software
• Produce and localize podcasts with AI voices | ElevenLabs