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Comment by shimman | Hacker News Reader

Just listen to actual audio books... literally doing double the work for no benefit... why?

There aren't a lot of highly technical audiobooks or ones that give the same specificity that would be the same as an academic paper

Not yet but it seems like they're getting to the point of AI narration finally being good enough to make any text an 'audiobook'.

Having said that I absolutely hate the audio format, I only used it when I had to drive or when I swam lanes. But these days I do neither.

No, reading verbatim from a technical paper is way too dense. You need a lot of filler words to slow it down and repetition to make it stick when read aloud.

Hmm fair enough but text manipulation is exactly something where LLMs do shine. Writing and modifying text is what they were meant for.

Ps I don't mean the word 'manipulation' in a negative context.

Okay but the user is describing listening to papers, then having to read the papers because listening to them isn't efficient. So why bother listening to it in the first place if you're going to read it?

Writing a book takes like 2-3 years on average. Papers are published everyday. Having a cute two-person "conversational chat" w/ audio works for a lot of people vs. just reading a paper. "No benefit" to you perhaps. Don't generalize the lived experience.

Okay but this person is literally saying that listening with LLM tools isn't helping their understanding and they have to still read the paper... why listen at this point? Why listen using a tool that literally causes you to do more work?

We all have the same amount of time on this Earth, saying how great a tool is that is causing you to do more work is just... weird?

I'd personally never do this, I value my time.

It can synthesize and summarize many topics.

For example, I can give it 8 papers on best practices in online marketing, it will turn it into a 20 minute podcast.

There are errors, but also with real podcasters.

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