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I actually want summaries of the top comment threads. often on HN I go straight to the comments to see if the articles is worth reading. half the time I get all the info I want from the debates that I don't read the article

Touché. I just come to comments and find out, from post you replying on, that it is not worth reading/listening because I find out podcast as timeconsuming way for gathering informations.

If AI adds aspects that I dont like on podcasts, it's worthless for me.

The show is currently a one-off recording doing all the rendering beforehand... But the beauty of what they've done here is that there's nothing preventing someone from doing this for every visitor. Don't like the way this one is generated? Give it your feedback and that can be used to shape the generated output. It was too laid-back chill for my taste, and right now, all i could do is adjust the playback speed. But dev time and money is the only barrier at this point to me having a conversation with the virtual hosts, telling them i like fast paced shows with more depth in the technical areas, and having them change and personalize on the fly -without changing much of what they have already ingested.

This presumes such a construct is capable of producing interesting content. I’m just not sure I’m interested in the insights of ChatGPT no matter how it has been asked to behave.

>Absolutely painful. I would love something that summarizes the articles and discussion without pretending to be a conversation between two people. I mean it says it is AI generated but they are adding all this conversational fluff which really does not work for me.

Yeah, the conversational fluff is easily my least favorite part of podcasts. Adding that to an AI version that should theoretically be even more efficient at summarizing/delivering information is... unexpected. A non-starter for me.

Yeah I'm torn about this- I kind of agree I'd prefer this to be a more direct information transfer. But I also think that a conversation between two knowledgeable people on a subject can add additional insights and can be more entertaining to listen to: That's what they are attempting here, but I agree this sort of dynamic is still too hard to manufacture from whole cloth in 2023.

On the other hand, the banter on this podcast is still less cringey than my local TV news, which is a compliment.

> a conversation between two knowledgeable people

Yeah I don't know if ChatGPT is capable of acting like a knowledgeable person but I suspect it would have a tendency to make the kind of novel insights that people tend to make. The most statistically likely word might be sort of smoothed over conceptually.

But also it was frustrating to hear the opening of this podcast go with "we are two AI generated hosts running on ChatGPT" and then when they move to talking specifically about the ChatGPT API article they talk about all these products running on the new API and there is not one single comment in that section where they say "and of course us too! haha" like any human being would if some relevant spot in an article came up like that.

Also the kind of tech podcasts I like to listen to are more critical. They are not just going to tell you what someone announced but also why some part of this announcement is probably nonsense or improbable. I can imagine this AI podcast talking about some new NFT announcement without any hint of doubt as to the claims made in the announcement.

Agreed, the lack of critical takes is a problem and removes some of the value- Probably not helped by the fact that chatgpt is trained to avoid confrontational language

Yep, I want a virtual assistant not a virtual friend. I want to save time that I can expend enjoying nature and my fellow humans. I don wan't to spend time with fake interactions.

Alas "computer" from Star Trek?

It doesn't need to be crude. It's just a matter of putting function over form.

How would you envision getting the audio summary? Feed the app a URL and have it come back with a spoken digest?

No, I like the idea of it being a daily summary of HN that is automatically generated. But the fake banter does not work for me coming from AI the way it does with human hosts. Basically with a human host I develop a parasocial relationship with them where the banter feels like we are hanging out, so it makes it fun. This is also based on human experience so the host will make comments based on their real life interspersed with the dialog. But the AI has no real life that it is capable of remembering, so the simulated banter feels hollow. In that case I would rather this be omitted, and simply do the summary that ChatGPT is good at without trying to pretend to be human. Basically a to-the-point, more businesslike attitude would be nice. Like it says "I found an article on XYZ" but you didn't "find" it, it was the second article on HN and you are giving me the top articles on HN. This mock-reality is uncanny. Just say "the second popular article today was..." and give me a summary, then summarize the discussion.

And summarizing the discussion is the real challenge, which I have not seen ChatGPT do. As another user has commented I do not come here for the articles, but for the discussion.

I made this [1] 6 years ago reads HN top 10 articles, top comment every morning... this thing has been sitting on my shelf since then playing everyday lol. Which is amazing because it's a janky breadboard that I never put on a solderable board.

Anyway regarding summary... I looked at rapid api before they have a sumarizer on there, can plug it into polly. It seemed decent but I wanted my own summary based on my own reading process... but never got around to it.

[1] https://github.com/jdc-cunningham/python_aws_polly_hacker_ne...

Do you use this each morning? What’s it like to do that? What other features or changes have you considered for this project but not added?

It's just running on a CRON job 8 AM... it's like an alarm.

The droning voice of AWS Polly is sure to wake anyone up.

A feature I thought about is putting the generated files elsewhere like cloud where you can play them to your wireless earbuds.