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Apart from Google Gemini’s recently rebooted ability to generate images (see I Don’t Know How I Missed It, But Google’s Gemini Can Generate Images Again, Including “Spot The Difference” Ones & Others), I have been decidedly unimpressed with most of their Artificial Intelligence efforts – so far, at least.
You can see my previous posts about them at Google Olympics Ad Touting AI Is Exact Opposite Of How We Should Teach Our Students To Use It, Google Unveils Its AI Video Creation Tool Today, & It’s “Meh”, and Google’s AI For Education Announcements Continue To Be Underwhelming.
Its NotebookLM seems to follow in that path of mediocrity. You basically upload materials into it and it can answer questions about it, create “study guides” (which didn’t seem great in my experimentation, and, now, in a new announcement, can turn your documents into very realistic sounding short podcasts.
Here’s a podcast it created after I uploaded out book, The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox:
https://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/files/2024/09/ELL-Teachers-Toolbox-First-Edition-1.wav
Pretty realistic sounding and well done, right?
And, a bit creepy when you think about it all – including the host banter – being AI-generated.
It could, however, as The Barefoot TEFL Teacher explains in a very thorough post on using this audio capability in an ELL class, have some potential in creating listening experiences for students.
However, the site doesn’t appear at this time to have the ability to generate a transcript for the podcast, which limits its usefulness to many teachers.
I assume it will eventually add that feature. Until that time, though, it continues to path of AI companies generating “solutions” for problems that don’t exist.
Apart from Google Gemini’s recently rebooted ability to generate images (see I Don’t Know How I Missed It, But Google’s Gemini Can Generate Images Again, Including “Spot The Difference” Ones & Others), I have been decidedly unimpressed with most of their Artificial Intelligence efforts – so far, at least. You can see my previous AI, ESL Web Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…
