About

How I use it

When I'm on the computer, I upload interesting new papers or books via the website, and then I listen to them while driving my car.

Favorite feature

My favorite feature is the control via the skip buttons on my steering wheel.

My experience

Currently, I'm listening to Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, and I tend to listen to a lot of sentences again to really understand them. I also use the "Explain" button a lot to get a simpler explanation when the topic is dense.

The "Ask" button turned out to be really useful to ask for translations of words, or to ask things like, "Can you put that into the bigger context of the chapter?"

Staying on top of my field

Another thing I tend to do when a new machine learning paper comes out and I want to get a quick understanding of it: I upload it and, instead of the original text, I choose "Explained (each paragraph)" and "Multi speaker". This is great for staying on top of new publications. It does not replace reading the original text, but it gives me a good idea of the principles.

Every paragraph

Compared to other services like NotebookLM, with the explain mode you get an explanation of every paragraph, and not just a summary of the whole paper.

Information density vs attention

I like listening to podcasts about my field (computer science), but often they are too shallow. A good book or publication has a much higher information density. Listening to complicated content while driving, on the other hand, is difficult. Once I'm distracted for a couple of seconds, I lose the author's train of thought.

Closer to reading

I tried several approaches to solve this dilemma. One of the two best options I found is to control the playback of each sentence manually. I decide to move forward when I've understood the sentence, just like I would when I read a book. The other option is to listen to a simplified explanation of every paragraph.