NotebookLM from Google is the flavour of the week or month or even year

Everybody's posting examples of podcasts produced by NotebookLM but nobody really wants to listen to them because they sound samey and anyway they are far too fast for learners of English to really learn anything from. One solution to that is to slow the podcast down to 75%, but the problem remains that the content of the podcast is probably of most interest to the person who wrote the sources it is based on.

This is the way it works: you add a file or a number of related files to NotebookLM and it will produce a podcast with a male voice and a woman's voice talking about the content of this file or these files.

Learners of English

My interest is how this might be useful for learners of English (as that is the only language the podcast can be in at the moment), although you can supply it with sources in other languages. I feel that an advanced level student of English and even an intermediate one might be amused to listent to two people enthusiastically discussing what they had written or said. 

Students are likely to find it interesting and fun to hear their ideas discussed in podcast format, making it more likely they'll listen and absorb language patterns.

To test this I carried out three experiments.

• I uploaded a pdf file of a composition I had written in my C2 Catalan course and I had to imagine that I could then listen to a podcast discussing what I had written in Catalan even though, of course, it was, in fact, in English. I think I would have been delighted. The video is 7 minutes long and I found it is better to listen to it more slowly. At 75% it would take 9 minutes to view it:

• The second experiment was to use a .pdf of a composition written by a student of mine who had given me permission to use her writing, speaking and photographs for training purposes. It was a composition I had corrected and was covered in red and green ink.

Despite being covered in red and green ink, ChatGPT and NotebookLM had no problem using it. Here is the corrected version produced by ChatGPT:

You can watch the video made from the podcast recording here. I think it's best to reduce the speed to 75%

What do you think this B1 student would have made of this podcast about her composition? According to Text Inspector this is C1 57%, so some way above Dolor's Level. (Lexically, it was C2, but Readability was B1/B1+)

• The third experiment was to take a transcript of a recording made by another good B1 student and add that as a source simply by copying and pasting it into NotebookLM 

I copied and pasted various version of the transcript into The GSE Teacher Toolkit including the transcript from another tool that generates a podcast, Lettercast.ai - Turn your content into audible experiences Here is a graph showing the levels of the different transcripts:

The graph shows that the versions I asked ChatGPT to produce with corrections and improved versions for B1 and B2 should all be useful for a good B1 student to acquire some emergent language from. 

The Lettercast podcast is not much more difficult then the original and even the NotebookLM version is still only B2, a level or half a level above the student, who in any case knows a lot about the content as the podcast is based on what she said.

My next post will probably be about using the audio recording itself, which only became an option very recently.