Tinkering Around With Illuminate (AI Audio)

Google continues to experiment and expand the use of AI-generated audio. It’s “podcast” feature in its NotebookLM is interesting (and a bit unsettling) but Google also has its Illuminate platform. Illuminate turns PDF research documents into audio discussions by parsing out the main ideas and creating a ‘discussion’ among AI voices.

I tried it out, and found a paper about Connected Learning in the Illuminate library. Within seconds, it had created a three minute audio file, with transcripts, and access to the original document. Illiuminate also allows you to open a chat box and ask questions of the document itself as you listen to the audio analysis. (The responses are text, not audio, but I suspect at some point, that could change.)

Here is an article about Google’s work on audio.

Here is a link to my Illuminate file on Connected Learning. It will probably force you to make an account, so decide that for yourself. The image above shows you what I am seeing, except I layered a screenshot of the actual PDF article onto the dashboard itself. You can download the audio file for use elsewhere. (Listen to the file generated for Connected Learning here, via Vocaroo hosting).

I think this could be an interesting way to parse through research documents, and gather information. The audio will likely get better. You can’t upload PDFs directly, but you can provide URLs for Illuminate to use.

Is this good? Bad? Again, as with the audio feature in NotebookLM, I am not yet sure how to think about it. But I remain curious. And continue to play.

Peace (diving in),
Kevin