Signagelive Turns The Microphone Over To AI Bots To Talk Digital Signage, And It Sounds Credible

September 19, 2024 by Dave Haynes

Hat tip to Guy Campos at AV Magazine for pointing me to this …

Signagelive CEO Jason Cremins, who with his CTO Marc Benson has a long history of being early adopters of emerging tech, has monkeyed around with some AI tools and come up with a podcast that is built around material from a publication and hosted by a pair of AI-generated personalities.

From Jason’s Linkedin post on this:

I recently used Google‘s NotebookLM to generate an AI-powered podcast based on the invidis consulting GmbH 2024 Digital Signage Yearbook.

The result? A comprehensive, engaging audio overview that distilled complex industry trends into a conversational format.

This isn’t just a text-to-speech conversion – it’s an AI-driven analysis and synthesis of information, presented as a dynamic dialogue between two AI hosts.

I am very familiar with that invids yearbook because I wrote several long-form stories in it. And I am also very familiar with podcasting, having done about 150 hours worth of episodes. The output definitely has some flaws, but the episode has credible content. Had I not known this was all AI, I’d buy into those hosts being real. They’re mikdly irritating (lots of EXACTLY! responses) and less than experts, but overall pretty believable.

We are still some distance from the moment when this sort of thing can just take over from real writers and podcast hosts, but you can see it coming. Age and creaking, arthritic bones aside, I am glad I’m on the 18th hole of my journalism career, and not just starting out – trying to work through what I could do that the bots can’t.

I wonder if I can train an LLM to be cheeky and filter all the bullshit?