AI feature to turn websites (e.g. news articles) into a podcast

tigerhawkvok

Hah. If we got this, I'd also ask much more strongly for the reverse -- turning the overlong podcast and video forms of news articles and such into a written text piece. IMHO if it's media-only it might as well not exist.

goto10

This would be amazing! I've had a lot of fun playing with NotebookLM's deep dive hosts. Incredible quality.

throwawayy2022

what does this have to do with Kagi? Just open a tab and use one of the myriad browser extensions that can reader it for you no? Or use a screen reader.

Perhaps there needs to be a new label, "AI Slop" :p

Temanor

throwawayy2022 I think this is a perfectly reasonable suggestion. It may not need to be integrated into Kagi search itself, but I think a feature like this could be useful in Kite, and maybe other areas as well.

oxlvlnle

throwawayy2022 I would suggest you to try the podcast generation feature in NotebookLM. I think that quality is what we want for, not limited on a screen reader.

ctoliver94

Temanor I think this is a perfectly reasonable suggestion. It may not need to be integrated into Kagi search itself, but I think a feature like this could be useful in Kite, and maybe other areas as well.

I agree! But not because of some fundamental issue with you or anything, but because....this is.... a search engine. I love Kagi and their mission but I really don't need Kagi to get into everything from dogs to groceries. If I want to find something I want to use Kagi. In the future if they make a branch of AI-assisted tools (which they already have with Assistant but that kinda muddies the discussion imo), and hopefully under a different name, then I'm game.

I guess I want a focused tool rather than Google 2.

throwawayy2022 what does this have to do with Kagi? Just open a tab and use one of the myriad browser extensions that can reader it for you no? Or use a screen reader.

Perhaps there needs to be a new label, "AI Slop" :p

Also this guy is, no matter how you feel about their way of saying it, kinda right. This is just AI for the sake of AI. And moreso I'm sure one Kagi search (😉😉) will net you tools than can already do this anyways. My entire thought here is what real value does this add?

I think literally none. And you'll make arguments about how great your news reader idea is, but... c'mon.

kirkmc

I recently tried Notebook LM. I find this sort of thing HAL-level creepy. The way the voices have that uncanny valley tone, and the way that it spends more time on its audio summary than it would take to scan a page, makes it seem pretty useless.

This said, I've been using Kagi for several months, and never really tried the summarizer. I guess since I'm a quick reader, and come from a generation that learned to skim and scan texts, I don't need it. I always worry about these things leaving out important bits that I would spot. I assume that summaries don't hallucinate, but I wouldn't really trust them anyway.

oxlvlnle

kirkmc I do agree with what you think about universal summersizer. In fact the lack of tweakable parameters makes me a bit worried about its quality of output. It's naturally easy for a summary to miss important points, even human can't do it perfectly and suits everyone's need.

kirkmc

Also, please don't call these podcasts. I'm a podcaster, and it's insulting to suggest that some synthesized voices reading a summary of something is a podcast.

andelink

I don't see how this is relevant to Kagi.

Richard

andelink It makes consuming large text or videos in particular more concentrated. Rather than watching a 60 minute video, you can get a 10 minute podcast that covers important points.

kirkmc

Richard These are not podcasts. And the OP doesn't talk about videos but articles. Ingesting a 60-minute video would be quite expensive in terms of token usage.