An AI house assistant we can talk to

My friends know me as an obsessive documenter, but in addition to taking pictures of everything, I keep meticulous records about our house, its maintenance, and in general, every project I’m working on. In an attempt to make the house information useful for my family, I created a Google NotebookLM and gave it access to the house notes. Now, Pam (and I) can text chat with our house LLM, which has already proven to be very useful.

For fun, I tested the Audio Overview feature (creates a podcast) and used the “Join” button to break in. It’s semi-usable–nowhere near as good as the voice interactions in ChatGPT and Meta’s AIs, but I assume that is just because Google hasn’t bothered (yet) to integrate anything better into NotebookLM. It blathers on and on in conversational podcast style, which differs from how it responds to text interactions. Also, this AI really needs access to the internet. If I wanted to make the NotebookLM even more useful I’d have to source PDF manuals for appliances, etc., and include them in the sources. It would be better if the AI could go off and proactively search the web for answers, although it would result in wait times between answers in the conversation. Maybe I need to write an agent that periodically sifts through my notes and goes out to the internet to grab related PDF manuals and other info…

In the video here, I cut 2-2.5 seconds of silence out after each of my interjections, removed 1 word (it said our street name out loud), and leveled the audio. It is otherwise unmodified.