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ZDNET’s key takeaways:
- The NotebookLM app now presents new customization choices.
- The platform is positioned as an AI-powered analysis assistant.
- Extra updates may be anticipated quickly, in accordance with the platform.
The NotebookLM cellular app simply received a bit extra customizable.
Now you can specify extra components inside the Google-owned platform’s Audio Overview device, which debuted in September of final 12 months. Customers can alter the size of generated responses (shorter, default, or longer — presently out there solely in English), and customise outputs with “guiding prompts,” in accordance with a Thursday X post. Guiding prompts are already out there on desktop.
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In an accompanying demo video, a person is proven choosing a shorter response, and provides the immediate: “How are Newton’s three legal guidelines of movement demonstrated within the launch of a rocket?” After clicking the underlying “Generate” button, the system shortly outputs a short AI-generated audio clip that includes the platform’s two signature voices, one larger and one decrease, interacting in a podcast-style dialog and discussing the physics of rocket flight.
NotebookLM additionally wrote in its Thursday X publish that buffering time on the app has been decreased by 95%. And whereas the platform has supplied multilingual capabilities since April, customers can now alter their most popular language straight inside a customization field within the Audio Overview UI; beforehand, you’d have to regulate the language settings in your system.
Extra updates may be anticipated quickly, in accordance with the X publish.
The rise of AI voices
Google Labs, the tech big’s experimental AI division, launched NotebookLM in July 2023. It has been marketed as an AI-powered analysis assistant that enables customers to achieve new views on and take a deeper dive into uploaded content material, which may differ from PDFs, Google Docs, and pictures.
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Google announced last month that NotebookLM’s catalog of notebooks — inner digital workspaces containing content material targeted on particular topics — was increasing to incorporate materials from The Economist and The Atlantic, each of which have content material licensing agreements with Google. New notebooks had been additionally developed in collaboration with scientists, nonprofits, and authors, together with Shakespeare’s work.
NotebookLM’s voice-generating capabilities have nearly uncannily humanlike tones, cadences, and quirks. They’ll do way more than communicate within the robotic tenor of a Siri or an Alexa: “That is the magic…uh, nicely, the physics of liftoff,” one narrator says within the demo video featured within the Thursday X publish.
Such lifelike voices have grow to be a significant point of interest all through the AI trade as builders race to construct extra partaking AI instruments. Many corporations constructing text-to-speech technology now supply fashions that may whisper, snicker, realistically imitate the voices of actual folks, and carry out a wide range of different spectacular audio stunts. These instruments might, amongst many different makes use of, present cheaper options to hiring human voice actors for advertising companies or be used to develop extra reasonable AI companions or therapists, amongst different use circumstances.
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In the meantime, NotebookLM and different platforms are hoping to usher in a brand new period of AI-assisted analysis and schooling. Software program firm Speechify debuted a feature earlier this month that enables Premium subscribers to rework uploaded content material into AI-generated “lecture-style” podcasts, or generate a podcast from a textual content immediate. The device could possibly be a helpful various for college kids who battle with studying or who simply desire audio-based studying.
