The Fosway Group put out a series of papers last week as part of their Digital Learning Realities series. Now in its 10th year, the research explores how L&D teams rise to the challenge of a fast-changing business environment and tech landscape.

I would strongly recommend you read through them to get a sense of where learning tech is as part of the learning landscape. I started reading through them but then thought it might be interesting to see how I might create something a bit different, using some learning tech.

In stepped Notebook LM – an experimental Google AI powered notebook tool and thanks to Andy Candler for highlighting it this week. I uploaded one of the papers – number 3, the new Learning technology landscape – and asked Notebook to summarise the paper. I then asked it to create an audio which it presented as a conversation between two people discussing the content.

It’s not perfect; some of the pauses and intonation aren’t quite on point, but it is much better than almost every other AI audio tool I’ve used. I can’t see it changing podcasting, but there are many use cases it could be used for including:

• Summarising content in a workshop and asking people in advance to prepare for it
• Summarising white papers and curated content
• Creating audio tutorials for software applications in conjunction with visual handouts or gifs
• Translating senior comms into audio bites.
• Creating audio case studies for problem-solving
• Creating audio guidance on how to support performance management
• Developing audio-guided goal-setting exercises
• Creating audio podcasts for internal comms
• Recording audio-guided knowledge transfer content to support knowledge transfer between experienced employees and new hires.

These are just SOME of the ideas I came up with in a quick brainstorm. Remember, this is also the worst it is likely to be – it will only improve from now on.

If you want help on how to design in this new world, please do get in touch.