Sep 11, 2024 10:57:00

'Google Illuminate' is now available, where AI summarizes papers and books and automatically converts them into podcast-like conversational audio

Google has released a preview of the audio generated by ' Google Illuminate, ' a service that uses AI to summarize papers and books and generate conversational audio content based on the content. At the time of writing, Google Illuminate is only available as an experimental demo, but you can actually listen to the results of converting papers into audio on the website.

Illuminate

https://illuminate.google.com/home

The Google Illuminate page looks like this.

At the time of writing, a computer science academic paper is presented as an example. Click 'Play' to listen to the actual generated audio. When the audio of the paper '

Attention is All You Need ' (PDF file), in which a Google researcher published the Transformer model in 2006, was played, the English audio of two men and women talking about the contents of the paper was played, asking, 'What is the core idea of this paper?' 'It is that efficient sequence transduction models can be created by not using recurrent or convolutional, but instead using an 'attention' mechanism. In the context of machine translation, this new approach not only performs better than RNNs, but can also be trained quickly.'

A player appears at the bottom of the browser and plays the English audio of two men and women talking about the contents of the paper. The player has feedback and flagging buttons to evaluate the generated audio.

Clicking 'View Source' will display a link to the paper, the length of the generated audio, and the date and time it was generated.

Google says, 'Because Google Illuminate is an experimental product, the AI-generated voice in the form of a two-person conversation may not always fully capture the nuances of the original research paper. Please note that there may be occasional errors or inconsistencies, and we are continually making improvements to improve the user experience.'

To use Google Illuminate, you need to click 'Sign in to join waitlist', log in to your Google account, and then register to wait in line. At the time of writing, it is unclear whether Japanese text is supported.

On the social news site HackerNews , there were positive comments such as ' It will increase access to academic papers and also help people who want to check out papers that seem interesting, ' ' What a great idea! It's a great way to learn about papers that you don't have a chance to read even if you download them,' and 'I couldn't listen to it for more than a few minutes. It's the same boring content as always, which seems to be a redundant generation result from a large-scale language model ,' ' It will soon be ruined by the carelessness of the generation AI, and Google will probably shut down the service within three years, ' and 'I think it's a problem that making it a real human conversation makes it difficult to see that the large-scale language model may be hallucinating or highlighting the wrong parts of the paper as important .' There was also a sarcastic comment that ' Looking at the top list of Apple Podcasts, there are a lot of real people who are deliberately lying and manipulating information, so you don't need to worry too much about computer-generated lies .'