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