If, like me, you’ve been following the development of generative AI and large language models as a tool for scholarship and productive working, you’ll likely be interested in the development of NotebookLM. Google has a version of this kind of tool, which ingests a PDF file and outputs a short podcast style audio discussion of the book which provides an enjoyable summary. It’s a pretty efficicent way to blast through a pile of journal article PDFs and sift for those that might bear closer reading. However, many readers will be cynical about google’s inability to provide a public good, so will be even more glad to hear that there’s an open source alternative, Open NotebookLM. Itsfoss.com has a pretty good writeup on the tool including instructions on how you can run it yourself entirely locally to your own PC. Worth noting that Open NotebookLM has a max 100,000 characters limit, and the audio quality isn’t quite up to google NotebookLM yet. But it’s a great move in the right direction.

Also, after you’ve done a few listens to podcasts from NotebookLM, you might benefit from some comic relief:

If you really want to have fun, you can even add faces for your podcast “hosts”