How was your weekend? I hope you had a better day than me. My car broke 🚘, I was left stranded in the middle of nowhere, and had to fix 🔧 my car in the freezing cold ❄️, but you know what? The newsletter is still here 🏆.
The highlights of the week:
NotebookLM is what caught my attention Notebooks (with AI Powers). Trust me it’s better than it sounds.
NotebookLM
Have you ever had hard times understanding the complex official language? Have you moved to Germany and don't speak it fluent enough to understand what does the Finanzamt office means when they send you a letter asking for a shit load of extra money because you've previously lived in the Netherlands? Fear no more, google is here.
This is a holy grail ☝️. It is a life saviour and if you’ve ever felt the pain of official documents and bureaucratic language, this is the thing to save you. This is my pain speaking, I have been here so many times before.
As a person originally from a third-world country, I’ve tried living in multiple countries, more often I’ve been living in countries where I didn’t speak the language, but was learning it. Well Germany was one of them. I tried learning it, and damn it’s a complex and hard language to get to a conversational level, the official language is a little bit on a different level..
Moreover this country’s main building blocks are bureaucracy - it is painful. What makes this pain burn a hole in your brain and leave a scar you cannot forget is that it’s all paper. Literally EVERY SINGLE piece of official document has to be sent by post and received by post. Electronic based conversation is just not fucking real.
To give you an example of how I used to translate letters from the tax office this is a routine procedure:
Scan 20 pages of paper.
Put it in Abby Fine Reader, to extract text from images
Save that as an HTML document
Open it in Google Chrome
Hit translate page to english.
This ☝️was a nightmare, the result was shit 💩 in the best case, but it was the best shit I had, the only other option was my tax advisor that would charge me money for this.
Anyways today I found out about this shit. Notebook LM, I just uploaded an official document, and asked it, please explain what is happening here? What is this document about, and it explained it to me, in simple and plain language. Wow! If only I had this while I was living in that country.
A Real Document of mine with the information cleaned: cleaned.pdf
Example automatically generated questions based on the contents of the file.
This is not the only thing you can ask it, and of course not the only type of documents you can feed it. You can play around with all sorts of documents, and see what the best thing you could get out of it.
I for example thing the next fantastic thing you could do is collect a bunch of notes from university and start making a questionnaire out of the documents to prepare for an exam, or for cheating you know the usual thing 😅
Another thing that google said it’s supporting is mp3 files. So naturally I fed the song “The Weather Girls - It's Raining Men”
And asked some dumb questions about it. Like, What’s the weather forecast? 😂, why is it raining men? What theoretical situation would make this real?
FAQ of the song :D
But jokes aside, this could be a really cool thing to take in youtube videos and analyze them, and extract the actual useful information out of it. Or let’s say you know there’s an enormous abundance of information in English available on youtube, but it isn’t available in {insert whatever language}.
Just get a youtube link, make a notebook of it and translate and ask questions about it as you like.
This way it is extremely easy to understand even quantum physics.
