A podcast generated in minutes by a bot—and yet I’ve heard worse.
A podcast at the click of a button—Google’s new AI tool can do it. It’s called NotebookLM and it’s essentially a summary bot. Input a document, hit generate, and out pops a briefing doc, FAQ, or study guide. What’s more, it can generate a podcast covering the document’s contents, hosted by fleeting ephemeral beings with chirpy American accents.
Take, for example, an article I wrote back in 2023 called “Cache is king when it comes to designing the gaming CPUs of the next 20 years.” In which I spoke to a handful of silicon engineering experts about what’s next for chip design. I fed the article into NotebookLM, waited around four minutes, and out pops a 10-minute long podcast.
Take a listen in the Soundcloud embed below.
“What the ****!”
You’ll have to excuse the expletive but that was my honest reaction to hearing it for the first time. A well-summarised document is one thing, but it’s the natural cadence of the conversation and the lifelike emotion that has sent me for a loop after listening.
They (I’m already acting like these are real people) even introduce the podcast… as a podcast. I have to remind myself when listening that these aren’t real people—they’re the product of me feeding a hyperlink into a box on a website. A computer feigning two humans sharing thoughts and feelings. I don’t know why but this feels deeply strange to me.
I’m not the only one who feels this way about the new AI tool. We played a version generated on our RTX 4090 review to the rest of the PC Gamer team and received such responses as:
“This is real existential crisis inducing.”
And:
“this is ****ing terrifying.”
And:
“the interruptions and responses from the co-host are freaking me out.”
And:
“I’m moving to the woods I can’t take it.”
My point is, NotebookLM is spectacularly impressive and terrifying in equal measure. What’s more, the analogies and references made throughout the recording aren’t drawn like-for-like from the subject matter—in this instance, a PC Gamer article. They’re mostly made up by the AI.
