This post is the first I heard about NotebookLM, so I immediately rushed to try it out. In comparison to Humata, an earlier AI service I've used that tries to do the same thing, this is a MASSIVE step forward. I'm blown away, genuinely. As the subject of the report, I judge its evaluation of my film preferences as highly accurate. I'm particularly impressed at how it picks out my own philosophical leanings from my mini-reviews. Also, all the references point to the correct part of the TXT I uploaded. It did suggest me The Lighthouse (2019) which I have seen before, but that's the only suggestion it made a mistake on. An improvement at least.
So far, there isn't necessarily anything here that I couldn't imagine ChatGPT capable of. At least, not without doing something about context size. Makes sense, considering NotebookLM is powered by Gemini 1.5. I give it to the end of the year before we see a competing service from OpenAI. However, at the time of writing I entirely agree that NotebookLM is by far the best AI tool for the job.
I agree also that the generated podcast is excellent. (7:02 to the end is particularly funny and insightful) The writing is legit funnier than most podcasts, and the TextToSpeech is finally good enough that I'm not bothered by the robo-voices. They breathe and laugh and pause and say uhm and stutter and sound tentative and at all the right moments. I genuinely enjoyed listening to it for the personalised narcissistic self-reflection aspect rather than just a curiosity for something novel.
Honestly, I recommend that every user who writes mini-reviews uploads a TXT export to NotebookLM and tries it out. Personalised write up and podcast in under a minute proves beyond doubt that AI is pretty damn good now.