Google's Test Turns Search Results Into an AI-Generated Podcast (theverge.com) 9
Google is rolling out a test that puts its AI-powered Audio Overviews on the first page of search results on mobile. From a report: The experiment, which you can enable in Labs, will let you generate an AI podcast-style discussion for certain queries. If you search for something like, "How do noise cancellation headphones work?", Google will display a button beneath the "People also ask" module that says, "Generate Audio Overview." Once you click the button, it will take up to 40 seconds to generate an Audio Overview, according to Google. The completed Audio Overview will appear in a small player embedded within your search results, where you can play, pause, mute, and adjust the playback speed of the clip.
The "tell me about Z" button (Score:2)
Billions of children don't know that they should not be looking forward to Google produced lectures, slide decks and podcasts on all of the topics they need to learn in school.
We're already seeing this with news articles which are simply "Take all of the 'first day of school' articles from the last 10 years and generate me 10 different first day of school articles to publish".
Great for illiterate people (Score:2)
It's great to embrace illiteracy, says Google.
Illiteracy is the natural state of humanity. While we had a moment during the 20th century, we are returning to a modern version of the middle ages, with the Warriors, the Keepers of the Knowledge, the Priests of the Temple, and the unwashed masses. <-- Hint: that's you
jezuz, get a bar of soap will ya?
lacks realism (Score:2)
It has to spend 50% of the time talking about the podcast, the podcasters, the podcast sponsors and generally being annoying. Maybe I'm anti-podcast but.. yeah I am. Read a book.
Steve Shives Found the Most Useless AI Tool Yet (Score:2)
The future of search (Score:2)
It isn't clear what exactly the future will bring, but the primary interface will definitely no longer be a simple link list. Perplexity has a good suggestion, but here we see that there are even more concepts. And they have in common, that they work for voice assistants. You can read a generated overview page to the user. You can play a generated podcast. You can also have an interactive (voice) chat about the topic that works more like a chatbot. We will see what sticks, maybe each variant has its niche.
How valuable is this? (Score:2)
I tried it in Google with the experiment on, and it didn't work.
Then, I gave the prompt to ChatGPT and it generated this half-way interesting slop text [pastebin.com] but the audio creation part failed. No problem, I downloaded some narrated audio and plopped it into Speechify, and voilà, it created a half-way believable voice that could adjust tone, rate, and mood. This half-assed podcast slop pipeline can imper
Re: (Score:3)
listen to the idiots! (Score:2)
Always good to hear how morons would talk about something.