The Pretend Podcast Hosts

One day, reading a Kindle book and getting a bit bogged down, my mind wandering at the slightest distraction, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone could read this to me?” I’d have to pay attention to keep up with the reader. Maybe I could read the words as I listened. Two inputs. That sounded good.

So, I Googled how to turn a Kindle book into an audiobook and other variations of those words. The search results appeared. I followed links, watched a million YouTube videos, read a few articles, and explored dozens of text-to-speech apps.

I discovered that my iPhone will read anything onscreen for me, including Kindle books. I can even change the voices of the reader: male, female, Australian, English, American, Scottish.

That might have been sufficient, but the Speechify app with its celebrity voices tempted me. It was rather expensive, but my love, Andy, said, “Go buy it. You’ll use it!” So I did.

I downloaded the Speechify app, connected it to my Kindle account and continued reading the book, Tiny Experiments. It all worked well except for an added pause between words every now and then.

Speechify can read web articles as well as Kindle books, so I imported a few to listen to. And that’s when I discovered something exciting: Speechify can make podcasts from whatever we’re reading. AI podcast hosts can discuss the main ideas that we’re trying to absorb.

I wondered if I could generate podcasts based on my blog posts. Could I find something that would explain the main ideas in my unschooling posts via some AI discussions? More thinking. More research. More app trials.

I found Google Notebook LM and used it to generate some Deep Dive unschooling conversations. The AI hosts seemed to understand exactly what I’d said in my posts! I uploaded the audio podcasts to my Stories of an Unschooling Family blog.

I worked out how to add chapter headings, hooks, and quotes to supplement the audio files. Finally, I uploaded PDFs of the audio transcripts.

Then, using the Clippit app, I generated some podcasts based on my Wholy Souly posts.

But that wasn’t enough. I wasn’t finished. Could I turn my audio podcasts into videos? What if I added images and captions?

Many hours later, after playing around with the PowerDirector and VEED apps, I had some videos that I posted on YouTube.

So, here is a video based on my last blog post, A Story Within a Story. The pretend podcast host seems to love the concept of layering novels within novels. I think she enjoyed my post!

And here’s a video telling my Complement story.

Finally, the pretend podcast host decided to tell my Plenty story, leaving it at a meatball cliffhanger moment!

Is it okay to use AI to generate podcasts with pretend hosts? As long as we’re not pretending to be someone else, I think this is a fun and creative idea to promote my blog posts. What do you think?

So, do you like to listen to books instead of reading them? Maybe you like to do both? 

Have you experimented with AI? Are you excited by the creative possibilities AI gives us? Or do you think we ought to avoid it? I’ve come across many YouTube channels with fake news of AI people pretending to be celebrities. I imagine that’s very frustrating and even dangerous for the real people. 

I’d love to hear your thoughts!