Google Illuminate: The shiniest thing I've seen (and heard!) lately

💡I tried it and joined their waitlist – and you should too?

Recently I wrote a post on Three Questions I Ask Every New Colleague, noting:

Auditory learners thrive on verbal explanations and discussions. They often retain information better when it's presented through spoken words, lectures, or group conversations.

Today, a new experiment from Google hit my radar. It’s one of those things that I, as a more experiential learner, had to try out to fully appreciate - and it was impressive!

Google Illuminate is built to “Transform your content into engaging AI-generated audio discussions.”

Let’s cut to the chase. List to this:

▶️ https://illuminate.google.com/home?pli=1&play=Pa5iGH1___bGy1

It is an AI conversation between two voices that do a good job IMO of passing over the uncanny valley[1]. The voices are reading the Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024.

It …illuminates? books too… here is a discussion about Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven:

▶️ https://illuminate.google.com/books?play=lAGZYj__zUn5

If you’re still reading, click on one of those links and listen now.

The key takeaway here, is rather than reading a document or book “for comprehension”, Google Illuminate is a tool for comprehending anything you read, by listening to two people discuss it.

What do you think?

Footnotes

[1]: I briefly touched on the concept of the uncanny valley in this post, but you need to scroll down to the numbered list under “Channel Handling”