Google has a new experimental1 tool called Illuminate (illuminate.google.com) that takes a link to a preprint2 and creates a podcast discussing the paper. When I tested this with a few preprints, the podcasts it generated are about 6-8 minutes long, featuring a male and female voice discussing the key points of the paper in a conversational style.
There are some obvious shortcomings. It doesn’t know how to pronounce words that aren’t real words (for example, bioRxiv, or Heng Li’s new Ropebwt3), and like many text-based genAI tools, it overuses the word “delve.” And, when I gave it my recent paper describing biorecap (blog post, paper), it delved into a discussion on generative AI ethics that I never wrote about in the paper. But, aside from these few quirks, I actually enjoyed listening to the audio it produced.
I used Illuminate to generate podcasts discussing a few preprints on arXiv quantitative biology that caught my attention lately, or in the case of biorecap and pracpac, those that I authored.
The full audio at the top of this post has all six of these preprints together, timestamped with chapters if you’re listening to this in a podcast app. Alternatively, you can listen to each individual paper below.
biorecap: an R package for summarizing bioRxiv preprints with a local LLM (https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.11707)
BWT construction and search at the terabase scale (https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.00613)
Genomic Language Models: Opportunities and Challenges (https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.11435)
Near to Mid-term Risks and Opportunities of Open-Source Generative AI (https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17047)
Guidelines for releasing a variant effect predictor (https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10807)
pracpac: Practical R Packaging with Docker (https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.07876)
Illuminate is currently marked as experimental, and it’s invite only as of this writing. I wouldn’t get too invested in this tool. I could easily see this ending up in the Google Graveyard along with Google Reader, Chromecast, Wave, and hundreds of other products Google has killed over the years.
Illuminate is currently limited to arXiv preprints only. I hope they support bioRxiv and medRxiv soon.
